Our GEO approach
We’ve built a three-pillar approach to GEO that takes you from diagnosis through to ongoing optimisation. Whether you need an initial snapshot of your AI visibility or a comprehensive strategy to dominate your category in AI-driven discovery, we’ll help you focus your efforts where they’ll have the greatest impact.
GEO audit:
Before you can improve your AI visibility, you need to know where you’re starting from. Our GEO audit reveals what (if anything) LLMs are saying about your brand, how your competitors are faring and which sources are influential. We work with you to create a comprehensive “prompt universe” of questions your buying committee is asking, then test these across multiple platforms. The result is detailed analysis of your coverage, citation presence, accuracy of portrayal and competitive position, as well as actionable recommendations for improvement.
Technical optimisation:
We make your owned content discoverable and extractable by AI engines. This means optimising website structure, implementing schema markup, improving crawlability and ensuring your content is served in clean, AI-readable HTML. We review robots.txt settings, XML sitemaps, canonical tags and internal linking to remove barriers to AI discovery, making it easy for AI engines to find, understand and cite your content.
Content & authority strategy:
We start by reviewing your messaging and content strategy to ensure it aligns with how your audience searches and what AI engines prioritise. Next, we build visibility across the channels that matter: owned content, earned media, social platforms, industry communities, trade bodies and key databases that AI platforms reference.
This includes creating LLM-readable content with clear explanations, natural language answers and credible data that establishes expertise. We identify which publications and sources are most frequently cited in your category, informing your PR and thought leadership strategy to build authority where it has the greatest impact on AI visibility.
Relevant content
Full Report: Mastering AI visibility – A Guide for B2B Brands
Our guide offers a clear path forward. Find out how LLMs decide what sources to cite, the technical foundations of impactful GEO and the four pillars of AI visibility.
Optimise your AI visibility with our Content & Website GEO checklist
Large Language Models (LLMs) now shape how brands are discovered, evaluated and bought. Use these content and website checklists to enhance your GEO.
GEO Audit: Understand your AI visibility
What are Large Language Models (LLMs) saying about your brand? Which competitors dominate the answers your prospects are seeing? Where might AI platforms be surfacing incorrect information about you?
Mastering AI seminar
Watch our GEO seminar, featuring exclusive research from Censuswide, fresh insights from Semrush and practical frameworks from our inhouse GEO experts.
Mastering AI visibility in B2B
Fresh off delivering their recent seminar on mastering AI visibility, The Think Tank’s very own Jo Wilmot and Ros Rowlatt unpack everything you need to know about GEO.
GEO glossary
Answer Engine Optimisation. Optimising content to be surfaced as the single direct answer by answer engines, including featured snippets, voice assistants and AI answer boxes.
Google’s AI-generated answer that appears above search results.
How present and accurately represented a brand is across AI-generated answers, covering citations, mentions and the context in which it appears.
When an AI answer talks about a brand without linking to a source. Distinct from a citation, but still influences how a brand is perceived.
A reference to a brand, source or domain inside an AI-generated answer.
A named thing (brand, person, product, place) that AI recognises and links to other related entities. Explicit entity referencing helps AI understand and cite content accurately.
Generative Engine Optimisation. Getting brands cited and accurately represented in answers generated by AI platforms that pull from multiple sources, like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
A diagnostic assessment of how a brand currently appears across AI-generated answers. Tests a prompt universe across multiple AI platforms to measure coverage, citation frequency, accuracy of brand portrayal, competitive position and source influence.
The AI platforms GEO targets, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Claude. They synthesise information from multiple sources to give one direct answer.
When an LLM surfaces incorrect or made-up information.
Large Language Model. The AI behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and similar tools.
The question or instruction a user enters into an AI tool to generate a response. Prompts shape what the AI surfaces and which brands or sources get cited.
The full library of customer-centric prompts built for an audit, covering branded, category and problem-led questions across the buyer journey.
The proportion of AI responses that mention a brand versus competitors in a given prompt set.
A headline metric for how often, and how accurately, a brand appears in AI answers across the prompt library.
GEO FAQs
Generative Engine Optimisation is the strategic approach to getting brands recommended, cited and accurately represented inside AI-generated answers from platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot and Claude.
GEO matters because, if your brand isn’t visible in AI answers, you’re being left out of buying conversations you don’t even know are happening.
- Over nine in ten B2B buyers use generative AI at least once when shortlisting suppliers
- AI-driven search converts at a higher rate than traditional search
- Most marketing leaders call AI visibility a ‘blind spot’, and around half of those who’ve checked find inaccurate information about their brand
- Brands with a strong press profile are more likely to be recommended by LLMs
GEO works by shifting the focus from retrieval to synthesis. Search used to be a journey of retrieval, resulting in a list of blue links ranked by keywords and technical health. Now it’s a synthesis. AI pulls from many sources, weighs their authority and credibility, then delivers one direct answer.
The goal of a GEO strategy is to shape the signals AI relies on to build that answer. That means optimising owned content for clarity and structure, building authority through earned media and credible third-party sources, and making sure the technical foundations let AI find and read your site in the first place.
A GEO audit is a diagnostic of how your brand currently appears in AI-generated answers. It’s the starting point of any GEO programme.
During a GEO audit, we build a prompt universe: the real questions your buying committee asks across branded, category and problem-led searches. We run those prompts across the major generative engines, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini and Claude, and assess:
- Coverage – how often your brand appears
- Citation frequency – how often you’re cited as a source
- Accuracy – whether AI represents your brand correctly, or hallucinates
- Competitive position – how you stack up against rivals in the same answers
- Source influence – which publications, sites and databases AI is pulling from in your category
The output is a clear baseline: where you stand today, where the gaps are, and which sources and topics to prioritise.
GEO is different to SEO in that, while SEO ranks pages, GEO gets you cited. SEO still matters, but GEO sits alongside it and pulls in PR, digital and content to build reputation and authority. They’re complementary disciplines, not competing ones.
Yes, a brand can have high SEO performance and still be ineffective in GEO. Research from Semrush shows that a few backlinks from relevant, high-ranking sites drive more AI visibility than many from unrelated ones. Earned media sits right next to that, and together they make up 80 to 90% of citations in AI answers. Strong technical SEO is the foundation, not the finish line.
To get your brand referenced by AI, focus on the signals LLMs use to decide who to trust. Good GEO comes down to four things: visibility (showing up across the sources AI reads), consistency (the same narrative about your brand wherever it appears), credibility (backed by data and authoritative sources), and relationships (being referenced by the publications and experts AI trusts in your category). For your own content, that means writing journalistically, with explicit brand and entity references, clear summaries, FAQs and data-backed explanations that AI can lift directly into an answer.
If your brand doesn’t appear at all in AI-generated responses to questions related to your field, it might be because you haven’t optimised the crawlability of your content. There are a few quick things to check to make sure your content is as crawlable as possible.
- Cloudflare’s AI bot blocker. Many sites have this turned on by default following a legal disagreement between Cloudflare and ChatGPT. It stops AI bots crawling sites until manually disabled
- Paywalls and content gates. AI bots can’t read what they can’t access
- JavaScript-heavy pages. If content only loads after user interaction, bots often miss it
- Missing or broken technical signals. Robots.txt rules, schema markup, sitemap errors and weak internal linking all play a part
When waiting for GEO to show results, plan for months, not weeks. AI models update at different speeds, and citations build as earned media, owned content and technical fixes start compounding. A reasonable cycle is to baseline with an audit, run four months of focused work and then re-audit to see what’s shifted. Quick wins are possible on the technical side, but lasting authority takes consistent effort.
Mastering AI visibility – A Guide for B2B Brands
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