Your future clients no longer search on Google. They ask ChatGPT.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the optimisation of a brand's visibility in the answers generated by AI engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude. The term comes from an academic study out of Princeton presented at KDD 2024. Where SEO aims at a ranking of links, GEO aims at the citation: making your company one of the 2 or 3 sources the engine takes up in its answer.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aims to position your pages in Google's results: a ranking of links, where the user chooses. GEO aims to get your company cited in the answers the AI engines write, which keep only a few sources. Both rest on the same foundation of structured, sourced content, but GEO adds its own requirements: answer-first structure, citable data, structured data. At AI Makers, both are handled within a single content strategy.

With both at once, because they share the same foundation: a technically clean site and content that answers real questions. Well-structured content works on Google and inside AI answers. At AI Makers, one content strategy feeds both channels: the trade-off is about which queries to target, not which channel.

ChatGPT cites the sources it judges reliable and easy to take up: content that answers the question directly, sourced figures, a clear structure, and domain authority. Concretely, AI Makers works two fronts: your site (answer-first pages, citable data, structured data) and the channels ChatGPT draws its answers from, Reddit and forums first among them, where we establish your brand with useful contributions. Then we measure, query by query, whether the brand is cited.

It depends on the scope: the number of queries tracked, the volume of content to produce or rework, the number of engines measured. At AI Makers, SEO and GEO are handled within the same content engagement, billed monthly. The simplest route: the free 30-minute diagnostic gives you a first picture of your AI visibility and an order of magnitude on budget.

The first citations generally arrive within a few weeks of publishing the optimised content, but the curve builds over months. AI engines re-evaluate their sources continuously: the visibility you gain consolidates with regularity and accumulated authority. That is why we establish the baseline on day 1 and show you the movement every month, rather than promising a precise timeline nobody can guarantee.

GEO is relevant as soon as your clients research before buying: B2B, services, software, healthcare, industry, or any activity where providers get compared. It pays off particularly well in verticals where the AI engines still cite few players: the first-reference slot is there to take. It is less relevant for impulse purchases with no research phase. The simplest route: the AI Makers visibility audit tells you within days whether your market is already asking the AI engines its questions, and who is being cited in your place.

AI Makers combines four tools: Profound and Peec query the engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) continuously across a panel of queries defined with you, Google Search Console measures the traffic arriving from the AI engines, and Ahrefs tracks your domain authority. For every query we record whether your brand is cited, in what position, with what wording, and who else is cited. That gives three indicators tracked month by month: your citation rate, your share of voice against competitors, and the tone of what the engines say about you.