What is GEO?

Where the term comes from

The term was introduced in a 2023 research paper by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues, published at the KDD 2024 conference. It describes generative engines, systems that write an answer from many sources instead of returning a list of links, and studies how content creators can improve how visible their content is in those answers.

For a business, the practical question is simpler: when a customer asks an AI tool for a recommendation or an explanation, is your business part of the answer, and is it described correctly?

Why it matters now

AI answers now sit at the start of many searches. At Google I/O in May 2026, Google said AI Overviews has more than 2.5 billion monthly active users, and that AI Mode has passed 1 billion.

When the answer is already on the page, fewer people click through. In a Pew Research Center study of the Google searches of 900 US adults in March 2025, 18% of searches produced an AI summary. On those pages, people clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits, compared with 15% on pages without one, and clicked a link inside the summary on just 1% of visits.

The answer itself increasingly shapes the first impression of your business, often before anyone opens your website.

GEO and SEO compared

GEO and SEO share their foundations. Google states that the same requirements apply to its AI features: a page has to be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet in Search, and no special files, markup or structured data are needed. The difference is in what you aim for, and how you measure it.

A business with strong SEO has a head start in GEO. It still needs to check what AI tools actually say, because an answer can be built from many sources besides its own website.

How AI search finds and cites sources

Each AI search tool reads the web through its own crawler or search index, and each lets site owners control access separately from AI training. What the platforms document:

The pattern is consistent: allowing the search crawlers keeps a site eligible to be read and cited, and blocking a training crawler does not remove it from search answers. Google’s own advice for its AI experiences is the same as for Search: make sure Googlebot is not blocked, and write for people.

Mentions, citations and recommendations

When you check what AI says about your business, three different outcomes are easy to confuse. They mean different things, and they are recorded differently.

A business can be mentioned without being cited (the tool relied on a directory), cited without being recommended (your page explained a topic), or recommended on the strength of other sites’ descriptions. Each points to different work.

How Glowtice assesses AI visibility

When we look at how AI tools present a business, we ask four questions, in this order. It is a working method for finding what to fix, not a validated scoring model, and it uses nothing more than the tools your customers use and careful reading of what they say.

Take a question a buyer might ask:

1. Does the business appear for relevant buyer questions?

What we examine. The questions a real buyer would ask before choosing: questions about the service, about a type of customer, and comparisons. We ask them in the language buyers use, and note whether the business is named at all.

What a problem looks like. The business appears when asked about by name, but not for the questions that bring new customers. Or it appears for one service and is missing for another it offers.

What may help. First make sure the website can be read and has one clear page per service. Then look at the sources the answers do cite: if every answer leans on a few directories or articles, being accurately present there matters.

2. Is it described accurately?

What we examine. Every factual detail in the answer: name, services, location, hours, contact details, who the business serves.

What a problem looks like. An old address, a service the business no longer offers, a specialism it never had, or a summary so general it could describe any competitor.

What may help. Find where the wrong detail comes from. Often it is an outdated listing, an old page that is still online, or a profile nobody maintains. Correct it there, because correcting your own website alone may not change answers built on the other source.

3. Does the answer explain why the business fits the buyer’s needs?

What we examine. Whether the answer says what makes this business suitable for this buyer: the specialism, the type of client, the language, the hours, the area served.

What a problem looks like. The business is named, but only in a list, with nothing that would make the buyer choose it over the next name.

What may help. State the facts that decide a choice plainly, in text, on the relevant page: who the service is for, what is distinctive about it, and the practical details that matter to that customer.

4. Which sources support the answer?

What we examine. The pages each answer links to, and whether they actually support what the answer says about the business.

What a problem looks like. The answer about the business cites only third party pages, so the business’s own website does not inform how it is described. Or a cited page does not contain the claim attached to it.

What may help. Make your own pages the clearest, most complete source on your business, and keep the third party sources that answers rely on accurate. Where a citation does not support the claim, that is a reason to check the answer more carefully, not to trust it.

From a vague description to useful business information

Many business descriptions are written to sound impressive rather than to be understood. A buyer comparing options, and an AI tool answering a specific question, both need the same thing: what the business does, for whom, what it can handle, and what supports its claims. Two illustrative examples, from different industries:

“Award winning” and “innovative” cannot be checked, and they do not match any question a homeowner asks. The revised version can be matched to a real question, such as an architect for a house extension who also handles planning, and every claim in it points to something a reader can verify.

A buyer’s question is rarely “who is a trusted technology partner?”. It is closer to “who can look after IT for a twenty person office that uses Microsoft 365?”. The revised version contains the facts needed to answer that question, and to judge whether the company fits before contacting it.

These examples are for illustration. They show how to write clearer information; they do not report the results of any change.

How to decide what to improve first

An assessment usually turns up several problems at once. These are diagnostic starting points, not explanations of why a particular tool did or did not name a business: AI tools do not explain, for a given answer, why one business was included and another was not. The order reflects what tends to cost a business most, and what other fixes depend on.

None of this guarantees a particular answer. It makes the accurate picture of your business the easiest one to find.

A repeatable assessment you can run

A first assessment takes an afternoon. What makes it useful is running it the same way each time, so that differences reflect the answers rather than the method.

1. Fix your questions. Write ten to twenty questions in your customers’ words, covering each service and each type of customer you want, and note the intent behind each: comparing options, looking for a provider, or checking a detail. Keep the list unchanged between rounds.
2. Fix the conditions. Use the tools your customers use, usually ChatGPT, Google (AI Overviews and AI Mode), Gemini, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Start a fresh chat each time, signed out where the tool allows, with the same location setting.
3. Record each answer on the worksheet below, as it is, before deciding what it means.
4. Check that your site can be read. Confirm that robots.txt allows the search crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot) and that your important pages are indexed, in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing’s AI Performance report shows which of your pages Copilot cites.
5. Repeat. Answers vary between runs, tools and days. Ask each question more than once in a round, repeat the round monthly, and act on patterns that recur rather than on a single answer.

Keep the observations as they are rather than turning them into a single score. A number would hide what actually needs changing, and there is no agreed method that makes one comparable between tools or over time.

What the research says

Studies of AI search are young and fast to date, because the tools change. They are still useful for what they show about how answers use sources. The figures below are from the studies themselves; Glowtice has not tested them.

What this means in practice:

• Specific, verifiable content is the safe ground. Clear facts, named sources and figures that can be checked are what the experiments rewarded, and they are also what a reader needs.
• Check what is said, not only whether you are named. Citations are often imperfect, so an answer can attach your name to a wrong detail, or cite a page that does not support it.
• Being in the answer matters more as clicks fall. If fewer people click through, the description inside the answer carries more of the first impression.
• Avoid tricks. Manipulation can work in a lab, but it is fragile, platforms work against it, and when several businesses try it, all of them lose.