Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Services
People no longer only search β they ask. A growing share of buying research now starts inside ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity or Microsoft Copilot, and those systems answer in prose while citing a handful of sources. Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of making your business one of the sources those systems can find, understand, trust and quote. Arb Digital does that work as a defined engagement β entity and schema foundations, content structured so an answer engine can lift it, factual consistency across the web, crawl access for AI agents, and honest measurement of what actually arrives.
Read this before you buy GEO from anyone
AI citations cannot be bought, guaranteed or reserved. There is no submission form, no paid inclusion, no ranking dashboard you can pay to appear in, and no agency β including this one β that can promise your brand will appear in a ChatGPT answer or a Google AI Overview for a given question. Answers are generated fresh each time and vary by user, phrasing, region and model version. What is genuinely controllable is the input side: whether these systems can reach your site, whether they can parse what you publish, whether your facts agree with each other everywhere they appear, and whether independent sources corroborate you. That is the whole service. Anyone selling you "guaranteed ChatGPT placement" is selling something that does not exist.
GEO, AEO, LLM SEO, AI search optimization β which term is which?
The industry has not settled on one label, and the overlap is real. In practice they describe the same programme of work seen from different angles:
| Term | What people usually mean by it |
|---|---|
| GEO β generative engine optimization | The broadest term, and the one most widely adopted. Being cited and recommended inside AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. |
| AEO β answer engine optimization | Emphasises direct answers wherever they appear β AI answers, featured snippets, People Also Ask and voice assistants. Older term, slightly wider than AI alone. |
| LLM SEO / ChatGPT SEO | The same work described by the technology or the single platform being targeted. Useful shorthand, but optimising for one assistant in isolation is rarely a sensible strategy. |
| AI search optimization | The plain-English description of all of the above. Handy when explaining the work to a board that does not want another acronym. |
We use GEO on this page because it is the term with the widest adoption, but the engagement is the same whichever acronym you arrived with. If you want the concepts pulled apart in depth before you talk to anyone, our guides do exactly that: what generative engine optimization is and answer engine optimization explained.
What GEO can and cannot do
What we can genuinely influence
- Whether AI crawlers are allowed to reach your pages at all
- Whether your pages render and parse without JavaScript gymnastics
- How clearly your content answers a specific question in its first lines
- Whether your organisation, people, products and locations are described as consistent, machine-readable entities
- Whether the same facts β name, address, pricing model, service list, founder β agree everywhere they appear online
- Whether you publish anything genuinely quotable: original data, clear definitions, specific comparisons, real methodology
- Whether AI referral traffic is tracked separately once it starts arriving
What nobody can promise you
- A guaranteed citation in any named assistant, for any named question
- A fixed position β AI answers have no stable ranking to occupy
- Identical answers for two different users asking the same thing
- Protection from a model update changing which sources it favours
- A complete impression count β Google reports AI Overview activity inside ordinary Search totals, with no separate breakdown
- A timeline. Assistants refresh their view of the web on their own schedule
- Results without underlying quality. GEO amplifies a credible business; it does not manufacture credibility
What's included
Entity definition
Your organisation defined once, precisely, and repeated identically everywhere: legal name, what you sell, where you operate, who is behind it, and which profiles genuinely belong to you. Language models resolve entities before they cite them.
Structured data that matches the page
Organization, Service, Product, Article, Person and Breadcrumb markup implemented so it agrees exactly with what a human reads. We validate every block, and we never emit review or rating markup for reviews that do not exist.
Content structured for extraction
Question-shaped headings, a direct answer in the opening sentences, self-contained sections, real tables and lists instead of screenshots of tables. An answer engine quotes the passage it can lift cleanly.
Citability, not just coverage
Assistants quote the source that says something specific. We identify where you can publish original numbers, defined terms, documented methodology or an honest comparison β and where you are simply restating what a thousand pages already say.
Factual consistency across the web
Directories, profiles, marketplaces and third-party write-ups all feed the model's picture of you. Contradictory addresses, dead profiles and stale service lists are corrected so every source tells the same story.
Third-party mentions
A large share of what AI answers say about a brand comes from pages the brand does not own. We work on earning legitimate coverage, listings and mentions through the same white-hat approach as our link building service β no paid link schemes.
AI crawler access
An explicit, deliberate policy in robots.txt for the agents that matter β
OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Bingbot and the rest β
so you allow what you want indexed and block what you do not, on purpose rather than by accident.
Server-rendered, fast, reachable
Most AI fetchers do not execute JavaScript the way a browser does. Content that only exists after hydration may simply not be seen. We check what the raw HTML actually contains, alongside the usual technical SEO foundations.
AI referral tracking
Analytics segments and reporting that separate assistant referrals from ordinary organic traffic, plus periodic manual prompt testing so you can see how you are described β and by what evidence β rather than guessing.
What about llms.txt?
llms.txt is a proposed file that offers language models a curated map of your site.
We are happy to add one, and we will if you ask β it is cheap and harmless. But we will not
present it as a ranking lever, because no major AI provider has confirmed that it reads or
honours the file. Treat it as a low-cost bet on a standard that may or may not be adopted,
not as the reason your citations improve. The things that demonstrably matter today are crawl
access, clean HTML, consistent entities and content worth quoting.
How we work
- Baseline and prompt audit We record how the major assistants currently answer the questions your buyers actually ask, which sources they cite instead of you, and what β if anything β they already believe about your brand. This is a snapshot, not a metric: it will differ if you rerun it, and we say so.
- Technical and entity audit Crawler access, rendering, schema validity, canonical and indexing health, and every place your core facts appear online. This produces a prioritised list, not a 200-page PDF.
- Fix the foundations Robots policy, structured data, rendering issues and entity inconsistencies first. There is no point restructuring content that an assistant cannot fetch or attribute.
- Build the citable assets Rewriting existing pages for extraction and creating the small number of genuinely original pieces worth quoting β in step with your wider content marketing programme, not as a separate silo.
- Measure, re-test, adjust Monthly reporting on AI referral sessions, the repeated prompt panel, and the underlying organic picture from Search Console β with the limits of each stated plainly every time.
What you receive
| Deliverable | Measurable? |
|---|---|
AI crawler access policy implemented in robots.txt | Yes β verifiable in the file and in server logs |
| Structured data implemented and validated | Yes β passes Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator |
| Entity and factual-consistency corrections across your owned profiles | Yes β a before/after list of every source corrected |
| Pages rewritten for answer extraction | Yes, as work done β no promised citation outcome |
| Repeatable prompt panel across the major assistants | Indicative only β answers vary per run, and we report it as a sample |
| AI referral traffic reporting (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini referrers) | Yes β real sessions in your analytics |
| Share of AI answers you appear in, across all users | No. No platform publishes this. Anyone reporting it is estimating |
| AI Overview impressions, separated from ordinary Search | No. Google folds them into standard Search Console totals |
Where GEO fits alongside your SEO
GEO is not a replacement for search engine optimisation, and treating it as one is the most common and most expensive mistake we see. Every assistant that cites the open web still leans heavily on conventional signals β crawlability, topical authority, and being findable in a classic index. A site that cannot be crawled and does not rank has very little chance of being quoted. GEO is a layer on top of a working foundation:
- SEO services β the core organic programme this layer sits on.
- Technical SEO β crawlability, rendering, Core Web Vitals and schema.
- Content marketing β the pages worth citing in the first place.
- Link building β the third-party corroboration AI answers lean on.
- Every digital marketing service we offer β the full picture.
Read first, decide later
We publish the method openly. Everything below is free, with no email required β and it is a fair way to judge whether we know what we are talking about before you spend anything.
Pricing
GEO is scoped per site β a five-page business site and a 4,000-URL ecommerce catalogue are not the same job, and quoting a single number for both would be dishonest. Tell us the domain and the questions you want to be the answer to, and you get a written scope and a fixed monthly figure before anything starts. No long-term contracts, and transparent monthly reporting. You can also see the published tiers for our related services on the services overview.
Frequently asked questions
Can you guarantee my business appears in ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews?
No, and no honest provider can. AI answers are generated per query and per user, vary between runs, and change when a model is updated. There is no paid inclusion and no submission process. What we can do is remove every reason an assistant would fail to find, parse, trust or attribute your content β and report truthfully on what follows.
Is GEO just SEO with a new name?
It overlaps heavily and it depends on the same foundations, but it is not identical. Classic SEO optimises for a ranked list of links. GEO optimises for being extracted and attributed inside a generated answer, which puts far more weight on unambiguous entities, self-contained passages, factual consistency across third-party sources, and access for a different set of crawlers. You need both; you cannot skip the first.
How long before we see anything?
We will not give you a date. Technical and schema fixes are live the day they ship, and you can verify them yourself. Changes in how assistants describe you depend on their own crawl and refresh cycles, which no third party controls and none of them publish. We report movement as it happens rather than forecasting it.
How is this measured?
Three ways, with different confidence. Referral sessions from assistant domains are real, countable analytics data. Implementation is objectively verifiable β a schema block either validates or it does not. A repeated prompt panel shows how you are described, but it is a sample, not a share-of-voice figure. Nobody can measure the total number of AI answers you appear in, because no platform publishes it.
Will AI search kill my organic traffic?
It is changing it. Answers that fully resolve a question can absorb a click that used to reach your site, and that pressure falls hardest on purely informational pages. The practical response is to be the cited source rather than the invisible one, and to make sure the pages that genuinely need a visit β pricing, comparison, booking, product β are the ones you compete on.
Should I block AI crawlers instead?
That is a legitimate choice and we will implement it if you want it, but understand the trade: blocking a retrieval crawler such as OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot generally removes you from that assistant's citations too. Training-only crawlers are a separate decision from search crawlers, and we will lay out which is which for your site rather than applying a blanket rule.
Do I need llms.txt?
Probably not, and certainly not urgently. No major provider has confirmed using it. We will add one on request because it costs almost nothing, but we will not bill it as a growth lever or imply that it drives citations.
Who actually does the work?
Arb Digital is a US-registered agency working with clients across the USA, UK, Canada, Europe and Australia. Everything on this page is work we perform ourselves, using the same white-hat, Google-guideline-compliant methods as the rest of our SEO services.
Find out how AI answers currently describe your business
Send us your domain and the questions your buyers ask. We will run the prompts, tell you what the assistants say today and what is standing in the way β with no invented numbers and no guarantees attached.
