Eighteen months of measured experiments across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, what triggers a brand citation, what gets paraphrased away, and how to structure content so the LLMs name you.
By Hanova Editorial
Generative Engine Optimisation is not search engine optimisation wearing a new name. SEO is about ranking a blue link. GEO is about being the source a language model names when it answers a question. The mechanics differ enough that a tactic which wins at one can be invisible to the other. After a long run of experiments across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, here is what actually moves a brand from paraphrased away to cited by name.
A search engine returns a list and lets the reader choose. A generative engine writes the answer and chooses for them, deciding sentence by sentence whether to credit a named source or fold the claim anonymously into its own prose. So the GEO question is not whether you are on page one. It is whether your name survives the summary when the model explains the topic.
A few things consistently help:
Vague, hedged or purely promotional language is the first thing to dissolve in a summary, and so is anything that buries the answer. If the useful claim is wrapped in adjectives, the model lifts the claim and drops the wrapper, taking your name with it.
Lead with the answer, then explain it, which is the opposite of a lot of marketing copy. Define your terms and your entity explicitly, and back them with schema markup so machines and models agree on who you are. Write extractable sentences, short and factual and able to stand alone, for the questions you want to be the answer to. And keep the story consistent everywhere, so your homepage, your structured data and your profiles all say the same thing.
GEO and SEO are not at war, and the same clarity helps both. But where SEO rewards relevance and links, GEO rewards being unambiguous, specific and quotable. Write for the sentence a model would lift word for word, and you are writing to be named.
Zero-click search has passed 60 percent and AI Overviews push it above 80 on the queries they touch. Informational traffic is dying; intent traffic is not. The priority order we now recommend to Kenyan businesses, from local presence to citation-worthy content.
Search engines rank pages; AI engines retrieve and cite them. Here are the five questions we grade a site on to measure how ready it is for LLMs, vector retrieval and AI answers.
