What is GEO (generative engine optimization)?
GEO stands for generative engine optimization. It is the work of getting a brand cited and recommended in answers written by AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity.
When someone asks an assistant to recommend a payroll tool or a family solicitor, the assistant writes a short answer and names a handful of companies. Those names are the result. GEO is the practice of trying to be one of them.
Why this is a separate job from SEO
Search engines return a list of links and let the reader choose. Assistants read the sources themselves and hand back one answer. The reader often never sees the list.
That changes what winning looks like. A page can rank first in Google and still be absent from the answer an assistant gives, because the assistant pulled from three other sources it found easier to read and easier to trust. Ranking and being cited are two different outcomes, and they are measured in different places.
It also changes who your competition is. In classic search you compete with the other pages on the topic. In an AI answer you compete with whatever the model already believes about your category, which may be years old and may have come from a forum thread.
What the work actually involves
Most GEO work falls into four areas.
The first is making a company legible to a model. That means being clear about what the company is, what it sells, and who it sells to, in language a machine can parse without guessing. Schema markup, consistent company details across the web, and a clean description of the product all sit here. This is often called entity work.
The second is content built to be quoted. Assistants prefer sources that state something plainly and back it up. A page that answers a question directly in its first paragraph gets used more than a page that takes eight paragraphs to get there. Original data, clear definitions, and specific numbers all give a model something quotable.
The third is presence in the places models read. Assistants lean on a small set of sources they treat as reliable, and those vary by category. For software it might be review sites and documentation. For local services it might be directories and news coverage. Getting mentioned in those places matters more than it did for SEO.
The fourth is measurement, which is the part most companies skip. See below.
How results are measured
There is no ranking position in an AI answer, so GEO measurement works differently. The usual approach is to pick a set of prompts a real buyer would type, run them repeatedly across the main assistants, and record what comes back.
Three things get counted. Whether the brand is mentioned at all. Whether it is cited with a link. And what the assistant says about it, which is often the most useful part, because models repeat old or wrong information confidently.
This is why the tooling matters. Running prompts by hand once a month tells you very little, because answers vary between runs and between users. The platforms listed here automate that sampling and track how the picture changes.
Be careful with agencies that report only traffic. Assistant referrals are still small for most companies, and a brand can be recommended constantly without that showing up as a visit. Traffic is a weak proxy for whether the work is doing anything.
Who needs it
GEO is worth attention where buyers research before they buy and where an assistant is a plausible first stop. Software is the clearest case, and it is the largest category in this directory. Financial products, healthcare, and professional services follow, because those are questions people are shy about asking a human.
It matters less where the purchase is impulsive, local and habitual, or driven by price comparison inside a marketplace.
If you are not sure whether it applies to you, the cheapest test is to ask an assistant what it recommends in your category and read what it says about you. That takes ten minutes and tells you more than most sales calls.
How to tell a real GEO agency from a repositioned one
The category is new, so a lot of websites added a GEO page without changing what the team does. A few questions separate them.
Ask which engines they track and how often. A vague answer here usually means they are not tracking anything.
Ask what they would change in the first month. Entity and schema work is unglamorous and specific, so an agency that does it can describe it. An agency that cannot will talk about content volume.
Ask how they report. You want to see the prompts, the answers, and the change over time. If the report is a traffic dashboard, they are doing SEO and calling it GEO.
Ask what they will not promise. Nobody controls what a model says. An agency that guarantees a position in AI answers is either misunderstanding the problem or hoping you do.
Where to start
Work out whether your buyers are asking assistants first. If they are, get your own house in order before hiring anyone, because entity and schema problems are cheap to fix and everything else depends on them.
Then look at agencies that name GEO as a service on their own site. A single blog post about GEO is not the same thing. Every listing in this directory is checked against the agency's own website, and services are tagged only where the agency names them, so you can see who is describing real work.
You can browse all the agencies, or start with a category. SaaS is the busiest, followed by ecommerce and professional services.