What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)?

Why GEO is now a separate discipline

A ranked result gives the searcher ten options. An AI answer gives them one, assembled from sources the model judged trustworthy and easy to parse. Being on page one no longer guarantees you are in that answer, and being cited in an answer no longer requires you to be first in the blue links.

That changes the unit of measurement. Instead of asking what position you hold for a keyword, GEO asks how often you are mentioned for a question, whether the mention carries a link, and what share of the answer space you hold against competitors.

The three things AI engines reward

Across the major assistants the same patterns keep surfacing, and all three are things you control on your own site.

• Explicit structure: valid JSON-LD for FAQ, Article, Product and Organisation makes your facts machine-readable rather than inferred.
• Question-shaped content: a heading that matches the question, with the answer in the first two sentences beneath it.
• Consistent entities: the same brand name, description, people and product names everywhere, so the model can resolve who you are with confidence.

How to start measuring it

Pick ten questions your buyers genuinely ask before they choose a vendor. Run each one weekly across the assistants and record three states: not mentioned, mentioned without a link, cited with a link. That single table becomes your GEO baseline.

From there the work is unglamorous and effective: deploy the missing schema, rewrite the pages that answer those questions so the answer leads, and check that your entity descriptions agree across your site, your profiles and your press coverage.

How Orion runs GEO for you

Orion monitors your prompts on a weekly cadence, generates the JSON-LD your pages are missing, validates that schema against the deployed page rather than assuming it shipped, tracks entity strength, and reports share of voice against the competitors you nominate.