GEO: how to rank your website in AI search engines (and why SEO is no longer enough)

More and more people ask ChatGPT or read Google's AI answer instead of clicking. GEO is the discipline that gets those AIs to recommend you. Here's what it is and where to start.

Two years ago, when someone in Mallorca looked for the "best web design agency", they typed that into Google and chose between ten blue links. Today, a growing share of those people ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity directly — and get a single answer, in prose, with two or three recommended businesses. If your site isn't one of them, they never see you.

We call this new discipline GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. It doesn't replace SEO; it extends it. Classic SEO fights to appear in a list of results. GEO fights to make the AI understand you, trust you and cite you when someone asks a relevant question.

The underlying shift is this: the search engine has gone from giving you links to giving you an answer. Google calls it AI Overviews; ChatGPT and Perplexity do it by default. In every case, the model reads web pages, synthesises them and decides who to mention. Your goal stops being just "rank first" and becomes "be the source the AI picks to answer".

And how do you get there? Luckily, not with strange tricks. AIs reward exactly what a good reader would: clear content that answers the question directly, that demonstrates real experience and that's easy to quote. A page that opens with the answer and then develops it has far better odds of being cited than one that meanders for six paragraphs.

There's also a technical layer that helps the machine read you well: structured data (schema.org), a fast, semantic site, and signals that there's a real, trustworthy business behind it — author, address, reviews. We'll cover it in detail in the next articles in this series.

For a local business like the ones we run at Teix, GEO is a huge and still under‑used opportunity: most of your competitors haven't even considered it. Whoever starts showing up in AI answers now will have the same edge that, fifteen years ago, went to those who took Google seriously before anyone else. If you want your site in that conversation, let's talk.