When someone asks ChatGPT "what's a good gift for a runner under £50" or gets a Google AI Overview summarising the best options for a category, the products named in that answer came from somewhere. GEO (generative engine optimisation) is the work of making your products the ones an AI tool can find, understand and confidently recommend, using the same technical clarity and content depth that traditional SEO already requires.
Get my free visibility auditGEO is genuinely new and the measurement tools are still immature compared to traditional SEO, so it's fair to be honest about that: nobody, including large agencies, has a fully mature analytics stack for AI answer visibility yet. What's not new is the underlying requirement. AI tools reward the same things that make a page trustworthy and clear to a human: accurate facts, real structure, and content that actually answers the question rather than talking around it. Ecommerce brands with clean technical foundations and substantive content are already better positioned for GEO than they realise.
GEO isn't a separate build. It's derived directly from the technical SEO work (clean, crawlable, well-structured pages), the schema and structured data work (accurate machine-readable product facts), and the content work (pages that actually answer buying questions). There's no separate "GEO department" service because GEO doesn't have its own content pipeline; it's a lens applied to the same underlying SEO and content work, checking whether it also serves AI extraction, not just traditional search ranking.
No, and any specialist claiming to guarantee AI answer placement isn't being straight with you. AI tools don't publish ranking factors or offer paid placement in the way search ads work, and the mechanics of what gets cited are still being reverse-engineered across the industry. What this service can do is make your product and content foundation genuinely strong enough to be a credible source.
Through repeated manual testing of priority queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, tracked over time to see whether your brand or products start appearing, and reviewing referral traffic in analytics from these tools where it's identifiable. It's a less mature measurement picture than traditional SEO, and we'll say so rather than presenting a false level of precision.
No. Search volume through traditional Google search still dwarfs AI tool usage for most ecommerce categories as of now, and Google itself is the biggest driver of AI Overview visibility. GEO is an added layer on the same foundation, not a replacement for ranking in standard search results.
No, and content written purely to be machine-parseable tends to read poorly for actual customers, which then hurts conversion and engagement signals that matter for traditional SEO too. The goal is content that's genuinely clear and well-structured, which happens to serve both audiences well.
Feed accuracy (correct pricing, real-time availability, proper GTINs and category mapping) affects how confidently Google's AI systems can cite your products, since inconsistent or stale feed data is a common reason products get excluded from AI-generated shopping summaries even when the product page itself is fine.
It's sold as part of the retainer rather than a standalone package, because GEO work genuinely depends on the technical and content foundation. Doing GEO-specific tweaks on a site with weak technical SEO or thin content wouldn't produce meaningful results.
A free visibility audit covers all of this, and shows exactly what's worth fixing first for your store.
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