ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews now answer questions directly, without a click. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and AIO (AI Optimisation) are how you get cited in that answer instead of skipped.
Businesses who've noticed AI answer engines are increasingly the first "search" a customer does — and want to be findable there too, not just on a Google results page.
An emerging discipline — search volume for "ai search optimisation manchester" is still early, which is exactly why getting the technical basics right now is an advantage, not a catch-up job.
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and AI Optimisation (AIO) are the practice of making your site easy for AI systems — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google's AI Overviews — to read, trust and cite when they generate an answer. Same underlying discipline as SEO, different destination.
No — it sits alongside it. Good technical SEO (fast, crawlable, structured) is most of the foundation AI systems need too. GEO/AIO adds the AI-specific layer: crawler access, llms.txt, and content structured for direct quoting.
The free audit checks your robots.txt against every major AI crawler (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and others) and tells you exactly which ones — if any — are shut out.
No one can guarantee inclusion in a generative answer — same honesty as we'd give you about Google page 1. What we can do is remove the technical barriers stopping AI systems from ever finding you in the first place.
A plain-text file at /llms.txt summarising what your site is and what's on it, written for AI systems rather than humans. Not yet a universal standard, but low-cost to add — we run one on this site.
Open your robots.txt file directly (yoursite.co.uk/robots.txt) and look for lines naming GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended or similar followed by "Disallow: /" — or just run our free audit, which checks this automatically.
Usually a security plugin, an old "block all bots" rule from before AI crawlers existed, or a hosting-provider default — very few businesses block them on purpose.
Yes — schema markup (Organization, FAQ, review data) gives AI systems an unambiguous, machine-readable version of facts that would otherwise need to be inferred from prose, which is exactly what a generative answer needs to quote confidently.
Same idea, different name — GEO, AIO and AEO all describe optimising for AI-generated answers rather than a list of blue links. We use GEO/AIO as the umbrella term on this site.
Ask them directly — search "[your service] [your city]" in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini and see what comes back. Tracking this consistently over time is part of what's included in this service.
Structured markup that tells search engines and AI systems exactly which text on a page is a question and which is its answer — removing any ambiguity about what to quote, which is exactly why we build FAQ sections with schema on every page of this site.
Not usually — llms.txt is a plain text file anyone can upload, and robots.txt edits are typically a few lines. The bigger job is usually confirming what's currently blocking access, which the audit does for you.
Not ready to talk yet? Start with the guides.
What search engine optimisation actually is, how Google ranks pages, and why "SEO" covers technical, on-page and off-page work — not just keywords.
The exact checklist we run through on every audit — technical, on-page and off-page — so you can spot the obvious issues yourself before you ever talk to an agency.