Perspectives · GEO
How AI engines describe your company. Your prospects see it before your website.
ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are already answering for you. Generative engine optimization is how you take control of that answer.
ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are already answering for you. Generative engine optimization is how you take control of that answer.
Generative engine optimization, GEO, is the practice of controlling how AI engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity describe your company when a buyer asks about you. And buyers now ask: before most prospects ever visit your website, an AI engine has already told them what you do, who you serve, and how you compare. If you have not shaped that answer, it is being generated from whatever the machines can find.
Here is a buying journey that did not exist three years ago and is now completely normal. A founder gets your name from a peer. Before visiting your website, she asks ChatGPT: what does your company do, who do they serve, how do they compare to the two competitors she already knows? She reads the answer, forms an impression, and decides whether you make the shortlist. Your website gets a visit only if the machine's answer earned it.
You have a brand manager you never hired, and it is an AI engine.
SEO is about ranking in a list of links. GEO is about what the machine says when it answers in prose, and the two are governed by different mechanics. The engines synthesize from your site's structure and clarity, from third-party mentions, from how consistently the web describes you, and from structured data most companies have never touched. You can rank well in Google and still be described wrongly, generically, or not at all by the engines your buyers actually ask.
When I run GEO audits, the same failures repeat:
The fixes are concrete:
This is not theory from a conference deck. I run this exact playbook on my own site and my clients' sites, and it survived a full replatform with rankings intact, which I documented in we replatformed a 140-page website in days. The editorial layer that keeps the content from sounding like everyone else's is the subject of the 80/20 rule of AI marketing, and the agent infrastructure that produces it at scale looks like the Monday morning brief.
I produce this as a scored audit: how ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity describe you today, side by side with your competitors, with the top three gaps ranked by impact. That audit is free. Submit your site through the free GEO assessment and I will send yours within a few business days. No list, no drip. If the gaps are bad enough that you want help closing them, that is what the call is for.
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of shaping how AI engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity describe your company when users ask about you or your category. It works on the inputs engines synthesize from: site clarity and structure, structured data, third-party mentions, and consistency across the web.
SEO earns you a position in a ranked list of links. GEO shapes the prose answer an engine gives, which often decides whether the buyer ever clicks a link at all. The disciplines overlap on fundamentals like clean structure and authoritative content, but GEO adds machine-readable positioning, question-shaped content, and entity consistency.
You cannot dictate it, but you can shape it: state your positioning in plain language on your site, add schema and an llms.txt file, make your descriptions consistent everywhere you appear, and publish content that answers the literal questions buyers ask. Then measure the answer regularly, because it changes as the engines update.
Todd Henderson is a fractional CMO for founder-led companies, pairing 30 years of brand and marketing leadership with a deployed team of AI agents for market intelligence, outbound, reporting, content, and GEO. He is a Co-Founder of Defining.com, the naming and branding agency, and runs his fractional practice as a separate embedded-leadership engagement.
Want to see your own answer? Run the free GEO assessment, or book a call if you already know the gaps are costing you.