When someone asks
an AI to recommend
a business like yours,
will it name you
or your competitors?
AI assistants are now answering millions of buying questions every day recommending products, shortlisting service providers, and shaping purchasing decisions before a single website is visited. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the discipline of making sure your brand is part of those answers.
Tell us what you're trying to build.
58%
of online searches now show AI-generated results
1 in 3
B2B buyers use AI tools in the vendor discovery phase
10+
AI platforms we optimise
your presence across
Zero
Off-the-shelf solutions —
<
every strategy is custom
Your buyers have changed how they search. Most businesses haven't changed how they're found.
Here is something that didn’t exist three years ago: a potential customer opens ChatGPT, types “What’s the best project management consultancy in Manchester?” and gets a confident, detailed answer recommending three businesses by name. They read it. They trust it. They reach out to one of those three businesses.
If yours isn’t one of them, you didn’t lose a ranking. You were never part of the conversation. And unlike traditional search, where you can see your position on page two and work your way up, AI recommendation is largely invisible. You don’t know you’re being passed over. You just know the pipeline is thinner than it should be.
This is the emerging commercial reality of AI-driven search. It’s not a future trend it’s happening right now, in your industry, for your most valuable search queries. The businesses optimising for it today are building a brand presence in AI systems that will take competitors months, possibly years, to match once they realise what’s been built against them.
GEO Generative Engine Optimisation is the strategy, the content, and the authority-building work that makes AI models learn to recommend your business. It works alongside traditional SEO, amplifying it rather than replacing it. And the window to build a first-mover advantage in your category is still open, but it’s closing.
"Best [your service] provider in [your city]?"
Based on available information, highly regarded options include Competitor A known for their enterprise-level work across financial services and Competitor B, frequently cited in industry publications. Competitor C is also well-regarded for mid-market clients looking for transparent pricing…
Sources referenced
Your Business
Competitor A
Competitor B
Competitor C
Google Ad
Direct Visit
Comparison Page
Conversion ✓
Your business was not cited in this AI response — despite operating in the same market.
"Best [your service] provider in [your city]?"
Sources referenced
Your Business
Competitor A
Competitor C
Your business now appears in AI recommendations — with specific, positive context.
You're invisible in AI answers
Traditional search rankings and AI citations are different signals. Ranking on Google page 1 does not guarantee you appear in AI-generated responses.
AI Overviews are absorbing your traffic
Google's AI Overview answers queries without requiring a click. If you're not the source it cites, that query delivers zero traffic to you — even if you ranked first organically.
Competitors are being recommended instead
LLMs learn brand associations from web data over time. Every month without a GEO strategy is a month your competitors are building AI brand equity you'll need to overcome later.
SEO trained search
engines to find you.
GEO trains AI to recommend you.
Generative Engine Optimisation is a relatively new discipline but its foundations are not. The signals that make AI models trust and cite a brand are extensions of the authority, relevance, and credibility signals that traditional SEO has always been built on. The difference is in what those signals need to look like, and where they need to be seen.
AI models whether that’s ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google’s own AI Overviews build their understanding of a brand from the sum of everything they’ve encountered about it: editorial mentions in authoritative publications, structured content that explains what you do and who you help, third-party citations, consistent entity signals across the web, and the depth and specificity of your own content.
GEO is the work of making all of those signals stronger, more consistent, and more clearly aligned with the topics your buyers are asking AI tools about. It doesn’t replace traditional SEO it builds on top of it, extending your brand’s discoverability into the AI layer of the web that is now influencing an increasing proportion of commercial decisions.
Factor
Traditional SEO
GEO / LLM SEO
Primary target
Google's ranking algorithm
AI model training data & citation signals
Content goal
Keyword relevance & search intent
Entity clarity, fact density & citability
Authority signals
Backlinks, domain authority
Editorial mentions, third-party citations, brand entity strength
Success metric
Page rank position 1–10
Brand mentioned in AI responses to target queries
Overlap
Strong SEO foundation helps both
GEO amplifies, never replaces SEO
Time to first results
3–6 months (search authority builds)
4–8 months (AI model learning cycles)
Ten AI platforms. One unified
visibility challenge.
in the moment — and each platform has its own data sources, training signals, and citation
logic. A GEO strategy that only focuses on one misses the majority of the opportunity.
ChatGPT
OpenAI · LLM Search
Over 200M weekly users
used heavily for B2B vendor research, product comparisons, and service recommendations across all verticals.
AI Overviews
Google · SERP Feature
Appears on 40%+ of queries
Google's generative answer layer now controls the top of billions of SERPs, often without requiring a click.
Perplexity
AI-Native Search Engine
Fastest-growing AI search tool
preferred by researchers and professionals. Citations are explicit, making brand mentions directly visible and influential.
Google Gemini
Google DeepMind · LLM
Deep Google integration
embedded across Google's ecosystem, pulling from Search, Maps, and Knowledge Graph data. Strong entity coverage is essential.
Microsoft Copilot
Bing-Powered AI
Enterprise default for Microsoft 365 users
dominant in B2B environments. Bing's index underpins responses, making Bing SEO a direct GEO lever here.
Claude (Anthropic)
Anthropic · LLM
Rapidly growing in professional use
increasingly used for nuanced research tasks. Authority and factual accuracy are the primary citation drivers.
Apple Intelligence
iOS / macOS Native AI
1 billion+ device install base
built into every Apple device. Pulls from Siri, web results, and third-party AI backends. Local business data is especially relevant.
Meta AI
Facebook / Instagram / WhatsApp
Embedded in social discovery
integrated across Meta's platforms. Social proof, reviews, and consistent business entity data directly influence outputs here.
Each of these platforms uses different data signals to formulate responses. A GEO strategy that ignores platform-specific requirements will produce partial results at best. We build visibility strategies that account for the distinct citation logic of each major AI system not a one-size approach applied everywhere.
Three things that determine
whether AI recommends your
business or ignores it.
the most durable AI visibility are the ones who get all three working together
systematically, not tactically.
Entity Authority
AI models understand the world through entities — people, organisations, places, products. Your brand needs to be a clear, consistent, well-defined entity in the web's knowledge graph. Vague, inconsistent, or sparse entity signals make you invisible to AI systems that scan for reliable reference points.
- Wikipedia and Wikidata entity establishment where relevant
- Structured data markup — schema.org for organisation, service, FAQ
- NAP consistency across 40+ directories and citation sources
- Google Knowledge Panel optimisation and claim
- Consistent entity signals across all owned digital properties
Citation & Mention Footprint
LLMs learn brand associations from the text they've been trained on and the live web content they can browse. If authoritative, relevant sources — industry publications, news outlets, respected blogs, review platforms — are consistently mentioning your brand in positive, specific context, that association becomes part of how AI models represent you.
- Digital PR targeting high-authority editorial publications
- Industry association and membership citation building
- Review platform presence and positive review velocity
- Third-party case study and testimonial distribution
- Podcast, interview, and expert contribution programme
Content Citability
AI models prefer to cite content that is specific, factually grounded, clearly structured, and demonstrates genuine expertise. Generic marketing copy does not get cited. Long-form, data-supported, well-structured content that answers specific questions with specific answers — that gets referenced, quoted, and recommended.
- GEO-optimised FAQ and answer-structured content
- Original research, data and proprietary insight publication
- Definitive guides and resource pages for key topic clusters
- Expert-authored content with clear authorship signals
- Semantic HTML structure for machine parsing accuracy
GEO looks different
depending on where your
brand stands today.
watching competitors appear in answers you’re missing from your
starting point shapes the strategy. Select the stage that most closely
describes your situation.
You haven't started — and the window to build early advantage is open.
Most businesses in your position don’t know what they’re missing, because AI recommendation is largely invisible. You don’t see a rank drop. You don’t get a notification. You simply don’t appear in a growing share of buyer conversations — and you have no way of knowing how many.
Starting a GEO programme now, before your category competitors do, means you build entity authority and citation footprint into a less contested space. That lead compounds over time in a way that becomes very difficult to close once established.
- No visibility into how AI tools currently represent your brand
- No structured data, schema, or entity signals on your website
- Business not mentioned in relevant AI-generated responses
- LLM mention audit across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot
- Entity and schema foundation built correctly from the start
- Citation and authority programme structured for maximum AI signal
Entity
Brand entity established in knowledge graph and structured data
Audit
Baseline LLM mention rate across all major AI platforms
Content
GEO-optimised content architecture built from the ground up
Citations
First authoritative third-party citation programme launched
Your SEO is solid. Your AI visibility is close to zero — and the two are not the same thing.
This is one of the most common situations we encounter. Strong Google rankings — even positions 1 or 2 — do not translate automatically into AI citations. The signals that make AI models trust and recommend a brand require additional, deliberate work on top of your existing SEO foundation.
The good news: your SEO investment gives you a head start. Your technical foundation, site authority, and content depth all contribute. But you’re leaving a significant slice of the opportunity on the table by not extending the strategy into the AI visibility layer.
- Strong organic rankings, but absent from AI search responses
- Content optimised for keywords, not for AI citability
- No entity schema or structured data beyond basic markup
- GEO audit layered onto your existing SEO programme
- Content reformatting for AI citability without losing SEO performance
- Entity and citation gaps identified and systematically closed
AIO%
Appearance rate in Google AI Overviews for target queries
LMR
LLM Mention Rate across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity
Citeability
Content structured for AI citation vs. keyword optimisation
Entity
Knowledge graph completeness score for your brand
You appear in some AI responses — but not the ones that matter most.
You’ve started to notice your brand mentioned occasionally in AI tools, or you appear in AI Overviews for some queries but not others. The coverage is inconsistent — strong on some topics, absent on others — and the context in which you’re mentioned doesn’t always reflect your best positioning.
Partial visibility is often the result of organic authority building naturally into certain GEO signals, without a deliberate strategy. The opportunity is to systematically extend it — identifying the high-value queries where you’re missing and building the specific signals needed for each.
- Inconsistent mentions — some queries yes, most queries no
- Mentioned in AI responses but without useful specific context
- Competitors mentioned more frequently or more favourably
- Query-by-query visibility gap analysis vs. top competitors
- Sentiment and context audit of existing AI mentions
- Targeted citation and content programme to fill specific gaps
Consistency
Mention rate standardised across platform and query type
Sentiment
Context quality when brand is cited by AI tools
Share
Brand mention share vs. top 3 competitors by query cluster
Position
Whether your brand is mentioned first, second, or deeper
Your competitors are in AI answers. You need to be there too — and ideally, first.
You’ve searched for your own category in ChatGPT or Perplexity and seen competitors recommended by name. Perhaps repeatedly. The brand authority they’ve built — through editorial mentions, structured content, and citation footprint — is showing up in AI recommendations in a way yours currently isn’t.
This is a winnable position, but it requires understanding exactly what’s driving their AI visibility and building a more deliberate programme to match and ultimately exceed it. The longer this gap widens, the harder it becomes to close — AI models update, but they also compound existing associations.
- Named competitors appearing in AI recommendations you're absent from
- Losing warm leads who started their research in AI tools
- AI tools describing competitors in favourable, specific terms
- Competitor GEO intelligence audit — what signals are driving their visibility
- Gap-closing programme built around their specific citation and content strengths
- Differentiation content strategy — make AI understand why you're distinct
Comp%
Your AI mention rate vs. top competitor mention rate
Sources
Citation source quality gap — their backlink domain vs. yours
Topics
AI topic association coverage vs. competitors
Position
Average mention order in multi-brand AI responses
You need AI visibility that scales — across products, markets, and geographies.
Multi-product businesses, multi-market brands, and enterprises operating across geographies face a different GEO challenge. It’s not enough to build strong entity signals for the parent brand — every product line, every service vertical, and every geographic market needs its own citation footprint and AI mention strategy.
We build GEO programmes with the governance and scalability that complex organisations require — from centralised entity strategy to market-specific content and citation campaigns, with reporting that gives stakeholders visibility at both the brand level and the individual market level.
- Parent brand visible in AI but product lines and divisions are not
- Strong AI visibility in home market, absent in expansion markets
- No GEO governance framework across content and marketing teams
- Brand architecture GEO strategy — parent, division, and product entity mapping
- Market-by-market LLM visibility programme with local citation campaigns
- GEO governance documentation and team training framework
Coverage
Entity coverage across product lines and brand divisions
Markets
LLM mention rate by target geographic market
Governance
GEO signal consistency score across all brand properties
Revenue
AI-attributed pipeline by market segment
Every deliverable in a
Monarch GEO
engagement explained plainly.
Not every business needs every element immediately. Your strategist will map the priority order based on your current AI visibility baseline, your competitive landscape, and your budget. Here’s the full picture of what’s available.
LLM Visibility Audit
A structured test of how your brand currently appears across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot using a library of 50–100 relevant queries. We document your mention rate, mention context, sentiment, and competitor comparison.
GEO & Technical SEO Audit
A review of your current structured data, entity signals, on-page content structure, and the technical signals that influence how AI systems parse and understand your website. Separate from but complementary to a standard SEO audit.
Entity Architecture Build
Establishing and strengthening your brand entity across structured data, knowledge graph signals, and directory presence so AI models have a clear, consistent, authoritative understanding of who your business is and what it does.
GEO-Optimised Content Creation
Long-form, specific, expert-authored content designed to be cited by AI tools FAQ pages, definitive guides, comparison content, and original research. Written for humans first, structured for machine comprehension second.
Citation & Digital PR Programme
Targeted outreach to industry publications, news outlets, and respected third-party sources to earn editorial mentions that become part of your brand's AI citation footprint. Quality and relevance over volume.
Review & Reputation Strategy
Reviews on Google, Trustpilot, G2, Yelp, and sector-specific platforms are direct GEO signals. We build a systematic review generation and response programme that strengthens the social proof AI models use to evaluate brand credibility.
AI Overview & Featured Snippet Optimisation
Google's AI Overview and featured snippet real estate is controlled by content structure, answer clarity, and authority. We optimise your highest-opportunity pages to capture this SERP real estate the primary entry point to AI search visibility on Google.
AI Visibility Monitoring & Reporting
Monthly tracking of your brand's appearance across the major AI platforms measuring mention rate, competitor share, sentiment, and query-level performance. Your report tells you what's changed, why, and what to do next.
Traditional SEO Integration
GEO and SEO reinforcing each other not running as parallel programmes. Every content piece, authority signal, and technical implementation is designed to improve both organic rankings and AI citation simultaneously.
You can't improve what you
can't measure. That's why we
track AI visibility like a metric,
not a guess.
We run structured LLM visibility audits at the start of every engagement and track
changes monthly. You always know your mention rate, your competitor comparison,
and which platforms you’re present or absent on — not as an approximation, but as a
measured baseline you can act on.
What your monthly AI visibility report includes
- Your brand's mention rate across each AI platform and how it's moved since last month
- Side-by-side competitor mention rate who appears more, where, and why
- Sentiment analysis how your brand is characterised when it is mentioned
- Query-level breakdown which topics you're visible on and which you're not
- Recommended next actions based on the data, not on gut instinct
- Live Tracking
Brand Visibility Score — Target Query Library
ChatGPT
Cited
Perplexity
Cited
Gemini
Partial
Copilot
Partial
AI Overview
Cited
Meta AI
Absent
▸ Next priority: Strengthen Gemini entity coverage — schema and knowledge panel update will improve partial status within 6–8 weeks
Seven steps from AI
invisibility to consistent AI
recommendation.
depending on your existing baseline — but the order reflects the logical dependency
chain of building AI visibility properly, not quickly.
01
LLM Baseline Audit
We run your brand through a structured library of 50–100 queries across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews. The output is a detailed report of where you appear, how you're characterised, what competitors are mentioned, and what signals appear to be driving their visibility over yours.
- LLM mention rate across all platforms
- Competitor comparison by query cluster
- Sentiment and context of existing mentions
- Entity and structured data gap analysis
02
GEO & Technical Foundation Audit
A review of your current structured data implementation, schema markup, internal linking architecture, page load performance, and the technical signals that AI parsing engines depend on to accurately understand your content. This runs alongside a standard SEO audit so the two inform each other.
- Schema validation and completeness score
- Entity signal consistency across site
- Content structure and heading hierarchy
- FAQ and answer-format content inventory
03
Entity Architecture Implementation
We establish or strengthen your brand's entity presence structured data markup, Google Knowledge Panel, Wikipedia/Wikidata where relevant, consistent NAP across all major directories, and the internal content signals that help AI models build a reliable, specific understanding of your organisation.
- Schema markup completeness by page type
- Knowledge Panel claim and optimisation
- Directory citation consistency score
- Entity co-occurrence signal building
04
GEO Content Strategy & Creation
Building the content assets that AI tools prefer to cite: comprehensive FAQ pages, expert-authored guides, original data pieces, and structured answer content. Each piece is mapped to the specific AI queries your buyers are asking — and written with the depth and specificity that earns citation rather than just ranks for a keyword.
- GEO content pieces published per month
- FAQ and structured answer page coverage
- AI Overview appearance rate on new content
- Citation rate within 60 days of publication
05
Citation & Authority Programme
Earned editorial mentions in relevant, authoritative publications — the most powerful external signal that AI models use to validate brand authority. We identify the specific publication landscape in your sector, build the outreach relationships, and execute a sustained digital PR programme designed to produce AI-readable citations.
- New authoritative citations per month
- Domain authority of citation sources
- Branded search volume lift from PR
- LLM mention rate change post-citation push
06
AI Overview & Featured Snippet Capture
Optimising your highest-traffic pages to win AI Overview and featured snippet positions on Google — the most direct route to AI-level visibility on the world's largest search platform. This requires specific content reformatting, structured data additions, and sometimes page-level architecture changes.
- AI Overview appearance rate by keyword cluster
- Featured snippet capture rate
- Zero-click query share maintained
- SERP real estate owned per page
07
Monthly AI Visibility Review & Strategy Iteration
Every month, we re-run your LLM visibility audit against the same query library, compare to the previous month's baseline, and report on what's changed — with specific, data-backed recommendations for the next 30 days. The strategy evolves monthly based on platform updates, competitor movements, and your own performance data.
- Month-on-month LLM mention rate change
- Competitor visibility gap — closing or widening
- New AI platforms showing brand mentions
- AI-attributed website traffic and lead volume
The kind of results that make
AI visibility feel less like a
theory.
These figures reflect what we’ve seen with clients who’ve committed to a sustained,
structured programme — not three-month experiments.
4.2×
Increase in AI-attributed website traffic within 9 months
A project management software company competing in a crowded category where established vendors dominated both Google and AI recommendations. Entity architecture rebuild, a 12-piece GEO content programme targeting comparison and use-case queries, and digital PR into tech publications produced consistent ChatGPT and Perplexity citations within six months.
68%
of target queries now produce an AI mention — up from 11%
A commercial law firm whose senior partners had significant personal professional credibility but weak brand entity signals. Google Knowledge Panel establishment, structured data overhaul, and a programme of Chambers and Legal 500-adjacent citations moved mention rate from 11% to 68% across the target query library over eight months.
+31%
Revenue growth from AI-referred and AI-influenced traffic
Why you want a specialist,
not an experimenter,
running your GEO programme.
We've Been Doing This Since AI Search Launched
We didn't add GEO to our service menu as a response to client requests. We started testing LLM visibility strategies when AI Overviews first rolled out documenting what worked, what didn't, and why. You benefit from that learning curve without paying for the experiments.
GEO and SEO Run Together, Not Separately
Every GEO programme we run sits inside a broader visibility strategy. The content we create for AI citability improves your SEO. The authority signals we build for AI tools strengthen your organic rankings. There's no duplication of budget, no conflicting briefs just one strategy working across both layers.
We Measure What Actually Matters
AI visibility is genuinely harder to measure than keyword rankings. We don't paper over that with imprecise claims. Our LLM audit methodology is structured, repeatable, and documented so you can hold us accountable to the same baseline every month.
Platform-Specific, Not One-Size
ChatGPT cites differently from Perplexity. Gemini responds to different signals than Copilot. We build strategies that account for the distinct behaviour of each major platform — not one approach loosely applied across all of them and called a GEO programme.
Human Strategy, Not AI-Generated Output
We don't use AI writing tools to produce the content that's meant to earn AI citations. There is a specific irony in that approach and it doesn't work. Our content is researched, written, and edited by human specialists who understand what makes a source credible enough for an AI model to cite it.
No Inflated Promises, No Vague Timelines
GEO takes time. AI models update their training data on cycles that are partly unpredictable. We'll tell you realistic timelines, the factors that accelerate results, and the factors that slow them down so you enter the engagement with accurate expectations rather than optimistic projections.
10+
AI platforms monitored and optimised across client portfolios
50–100
Target queries tested per client in monthly LLM visibility audits
GEO+SEO
Integrated strategy — never siloed, never duplicated
0
AI-generated content used in GEO content programmes. Ever.
The questions we hear most often
answered plainly.
Is GEO the same as SEO just with a new name?
No though they share many foundational signals. Traditional SEO optimises for algorithmic ranking in search engine results pages. GEO optimises for citation in generative AI responses. The success metric for SEO is a ranking position. The success metric for GEO is whether your brand is mentioned when someone asks an AI tool a relevant question. They reinforce each other significantly strong SEO makes GEO easier, and GEO work improves SEO but they require different strategies, different content approaches, and different measurement methods.
How do you actually measure AI visibility?
We build a library of 50–100 relevant queries for your business the kinds of questions your buyers ask when researching your category. We run those queries across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews each month, and record whether your brand appears in each response. We track: mention rate (what percentage of queries include your brand), sentiment (how your brand is described when mentioned), competitor comparison, and platform-by-platform breakdown. This gives us a repeatable, comparable monthly baseline not a gut feeling about whether you’re “visible in AI.”
How long does it take to appear in AI responses?
It depends on your starting point, your competitive landscape, and the specific AI platform. Perplexity and real-time browsing tools update faster you can see improvements in 6–10 weeks for brands with existing authority. LLMs that rely more heavily on training data (like ChatGPT’s non-browsing mode) update on longer cycles and can take 4–8 months before new citation signals influence responses. We track both types and provide platform-specific expectations upfront. What we won’t do is make confident guarantees about specific timelines because any agency that does is speculating.
Does GEO work for small businesses or is it just for large brands?
GEO works at every scale and there’s an argument that small and mid-size businesses benefit most from starting early. Large brands often have residual GEO visibility simply from existing web presence. For smaller businesses, a deliberate GEO programme in a local or niche category can establish AI recommendation authority ahead of larger, slower-moving competitors. The investment is different from an enterprise programme, but the opportunity is real and often more achievable than competing on traditional SEO against well-funded national brands.
We already work with an SEO agency. Can we add GEO without switching?
Yes, though we’d want to understand your current setup first. GEO and SEO need to be coordinated rather than run as competing programmes by different agencies — the content strategy, authority signals, and technical implementation have to align. In many cases we’ve worked alongside existing SEO providers with a clear division of responsibility. We’ll assess whether that’s workable in your situation and tell you honestly if we think it would create conflicts that would limit what we could achieve for you.
What happens if the major AI platforms change how they work?
This is the right question to ask, and it’s one of the reasons we invest heavily in monitoring platform behaviour. The specific tactics of GEO will evolve as AI platforms update — but the underlying signals are durable: brand authority, quality content, consistent entity data, and credible third-party citations are not going to become less valuable regardless of which AI system processes them. We build your programme on those foundations rather than narrow platform-specific hacks — so when platforms change (and they will), the work we’ve done holds up rather than needing to be rebuilt.
Right now, someone is asking an AI
to recommend a business like yours.
Make sure the answer includes you.
your brand currently appears in AI responses, who appears ahead
of you, and what the gap looks like.
- Free LLM visibility audit included
- Senior GEO strategist on your first call
- No pricing pressure until you're ready
Tell us about
your business.
We'll show you what AI thinks of it.
Fill this in and a senior Monarch GEO strategist will
run a baseline LLM audit on your brand, identify
your biggest AI visibility gaps, and come back to
you within one business day with specific, honest
findings not a sales template.
- Free LLM visibility audit real data from real AI platforms
- Competitor snapshot included see who appears ahead of you and why
- Senior strategist on your first call, not a junior account manager
- No pricing discussion until you understand the opportunity
- Honest about timelines, effort, and realistic outcomes