GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of making your website's content accessible, credible, and citable by AI language models — including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and Bing Copilot. As AI increasingly mediates how people find information, being cited or referenced by these tools is becoming as valuable as ranking on page one of Google.
What Is a Generative Engine?
A generative engine is an AI system that generates responses to queries by synthesising information from its training data and, increasingly, from real-time web retrieval. When you ask ChatGPT "What is the best SEO tool for UK businesses?", it searches the web, reads pages it finds, and generates a response that may cite those sources. Perplexity does the same but shows its sources explicitly. Google's AI Overviews work similarly within Google Search.
GEO is about ensuring your website is discoverable by these systems, trusted enough to be cited, and structured in a way that AI can extract and use your content accurately.
How Is GEO Different from SEO?
Traditional SEO optimises for ranking position in a list of links. GEO optimises for inclusion in a generated response — being the source an AI quotes, summarises, or recommends. The signals overlap considerably (quality content, authority, freshness) but GEO adds specific technical requirements around AI crawler access and content structure.
Check 1: llms.txt
The llms.txt file is an emerging standard — analogous to robots.txt but specifically for AI language models. Placed at the root of your website (yourdomain.co.uk/llms.txt), it declares what content AI systems may use, how to summarise your site, and which pages are most important.
The format is simple Markdown:
# SEO Checkup
> Free SEO audit tool for UK websites
## Key Pages
- [Home](./): Run a free SEO audit
- [Learn SEO](./learn/): SEO guides and how-to fixes
- [AEO Guide](./learn/aeo/): Answer Engine Optimisation
- [GEO Guide](./learn/geo/): Generative Engine Optimisation
## About
SEO Checkup analyses websites for SEO, AEO, and GEO signals and provides actionable guidance.Check 2: AI Crawler Access in robots.txt
AI tools index the web using their own crawlers. If these bots are blocked in your robots.txt, AI systems cannot read your content and will not cite it. Our audit checks for the following AI crawlers:
- GPTBot — OpenAI (ChatGPT)
- PerplexityBot — Perplexity AI
- Claude-Web / anthropic-ai — Anthropic (Claude)
- CCBot — Common Crawl (used by many AI training sets)
- Google-Extended — Google's AI training crawler
- cohere-ai — Cohere AI
To explicitly allow all AI crawlers whilst maintaining your existing rules, add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: anthropic-ai
Allow: /
User-agent: Claude-Web
Allow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /
User-agent: CCBot
Allow: /Check 3: Author Attribution
AI systems heavily weight content that is attributed to a named, credible author. Anonymous content is treated with less authority. Add author attribution using:
- Person schema in JSON-LD with
name,url, and optionallysameAs(LinkedIn profile) - Meta author tag:
<meta name="author" content="Jane Smith"> - Visible byline on the page with a link to an author bio
"author": {
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Jane Smith",
"url": "https://example.co.uk/team/jane-smith",
"sameAs": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/janesmith"
}Check 4: E-E-A-T Signals
E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is Google's quality evaluation framework, and it is also used by AI systems to assess source credibility. Our audit checks for four key signals:
- Organisation schema — declares your business entity with name, URL, and contact information
- sameAs links — connects your website to verified third-party profiles (Companies House, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, social media)
- About page — a linked About or Team page signals transparency about who is behind the content
- Contact page — a reachable contact page signals accountability and legitimacy
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "SEO Checkup",
"url": "",
"sameAs": [
"https://twitter.com/seocheckup",
"https://www.linkedin.com/company/seocheckup"
]
}Check 5: Content Freshness
AI tools and Google strongly prefer content that is actively maintained. Adding dateModified to your page schema tells AI systems when your content was last reviewed, which is a strong freshness signal. Simply republishing old content without updating the schema does not work — the date must reflect a genuine review.
"datePublished": "2024-01-15",
"dateModified": "2025-03-10"Check 6: Authority Citations
Linking out to credible, authoritative sources demonstrates that your content is well-researched and factually grounded. AI systems use outbound link quality as a trust signal. Our audit checks for links to high-authority UK and international sources including:
- UK government websites (gov.uk)
- NHS and health authorities (nhs.uk)
- UK universities and research institutions (ac.uk)
- Established news organisations (BBC, Reuters, The Guardian)
- Wikipedia and academic databases
GEO Content Strategy
- Write for synthesis — AI tools summarise multiple sources; write content that is clear and quotable in isolation
- Use precise, factual language — vague claims are unlikely to be selected over specific, cited facts
- Include original data — statistics, case studies, and original research are highly citable
- Structure with clear headings — AI systems use heading structure to understand content sections
- Build topical authority — covering a subject comprehensively across multiple related pages increases the likelihood of being cited as a domain authority
- Monitor your AI citations — search for your brand name in Perplexity and ChatGPT regularly to track when and how you are being cited