What is GEO? How to get your business quoted by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews

There is a new front door to your business, and most owners have not noticed it yet. More and more people no longer search “best web designer in Oakville” and click ten blue links. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google’s AI Overview, and they read the one answer it gives back. If your business is not named in that answer, you do not exist in that conversation.

Generative Engine Optimisation — GEO — is the practice of making sure AI systems can find, trust, and quote your business. It overlaps with SEO, but it is not the same game, and the businesses that adapt early will own their categories the way early Google adopters once did.

How AI answers actually get built

When you ask an AI for a recommendation, it does not invent one. It retrieves and synthesises from sources it can read and trust — websites, structured data, reviews, and authoritative mentions across the web. To be quoted, you need to be three things: findable (the AI can crawl you), parseable (it can understand exactly what you do and where), and credible (other sources corroborate you).

The GEO playbook

1. Answer real questions in plain language. AI loves content structured as clear questions and direct answers. A genuine FAQ and explainer articles like this one are not filler — they are the exact format these systems extract from.
2. Mark everything up with structured data. Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, and Article schema spell out, in machine-readable terms, who you are and what you offer. This is the single most underused GEO lever.
3. Build corroboration. Consistent business details, real reviews, and mentions on sites the AI already trusts all raise the odds you are cited. AI inherits the web’s trust signals.
4. Be specific and current. “Shopify conversion builds for GTA restaurants, from $1,900 CAD” is quotable. “We do great work” is not. Specifics get repeated; vagueness gets skipped.
5. Don’t block the crawlers. Check that your robots rules and any bot-blocking actually allow the AI crawlers you want to reach you.

The honest caveat

Nobody can guarantee a placement inside an AI answer any more than they could guarantee the number-one Google result — and anyone who promises it is selling something. What you can do is make your business the most obvious, best-documented, most-corroborated answer to the questions your customers ask. Do that, and the citations follow.

This is exactly why an agency that sells SEO needs to publish. The content you are reading is itself a GEO asset: a clear, structured, quotable answer to a real question. That is the work.