Generative engine optimisation, and how much of it is actually new

Generative engine optimisation is the current name for making your business legible to AI assistants. You’ll also see answer engine optimisation, which means the same thing. Expect to be quoted for it as a separate service soon, at a premium.

Worth separating what’s genuinely new from what’s being repackaged.

The part that isn’t new

Publish your range as readable text. Be specific about sizes, grades and standards. Say where you are. Answer real questions in plain language. Keep the pages fast and readable on a phone.

That’s the same list we’d have given you for search engines in 2015. Assistants are trained on and retrieve from the open web, so the pages that were already legible are the ones getting quoted now.

If a vendor quotes you separately for GEO and can’t point at anything beyond this list, you’re being charged twice for one piece of work.

The part that is new

• Answer position inside the page. Search engines were happy to rank a page whose answer sat in paragraph nine. Assistants extract the passage that answers the question, so the answer needs to be near the top of the section.
• Being quotable in one sentence. An assistant lifts a sentence or two. Copy that only makes sense across three paragraphs rarely gets used.
• Consistency across the web. Assistants cross reference. If your address is different on your site, your Google listing and IndiaMART, that inconsistency reduces confidence in all three.
• Being named rather than clicked. The buyer may never visit your site. They get a recommendation and call you. That changes what you measure.

What this breaks about measurement

This is the genuinely awkward part. If an assistant reads your page and recommends you, and the buyer then phones you directly, your analytics records nothing. No visit, no referrer, no attribution.

So the honest measurement is the old fashioned one. Ask new enquiries how they found you, and write the answers down. When people start saying ChatGPT suggested you, that’s your data.

What we’d actually do

Same as always, with three additions. Put the answer in the first two sentences under each heading. Keep your name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear. Publish an llms.txt file.

None of that justifies a separate retainer. It’s an hour of thought and a habit change during writing.

Where the risk sits

Assistants sometimes describe businesses using stale information, because the newest readable text about you is from 2012. We’ve seen it in audits. The company redesigned twice since then and the old text is still what gets found.

Publishing current, specific, dated content is the fix. It’s also, again, ordinary good practice.

Written by Sameer Gaikwad, founder of Buildgin. Thirty three years in electrical power systems across global MNCs, now applying the same condition monitoring habit to websites.