GEO stands for generative engine optimisation. It is the work of getting your pages quoted by the systems that answer questions directly instead of handing over a list of links: ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot.<\/p>\n
The name is new. Most of the work is not. What has changed is where the click goes, and whether there is a click at all.<\/p>\n
Search used to send you traffic. Generative engines send you a mention, and sometimes a link under a fold nobody scrolls to. GEO is about being the source the answer was built from, which is a different job from being the first blue link.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
For twenty years the deal was simple. You wrote a page, a search engine indexed it, and if you ranked well enough people clicked through and arrived on your site. You could count them.<\/p>\n
An answer engine breaks that in the middle. Someone asks how to stop a WordPress plugin publishing without review. The model composes an answer out of several sources, states it plainly, and moves on. Your page might be one of the sources. The reader never sees it.<\/p>\n
That is not automatically bad. A mention in an answer someone trusts is worth something, and for a product like ours a citation in “which WordPress AI plugins keep a human in the loop” is worth more than a hundred bounced sessions. But it is measured differently and won it differently, which is the whole reason the acronym exists.<\/p>\n