What is generative engine optimisation (GEO)?

How AI assistants decide what to quote

When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question, it does an ordinary search behind the scenes, pulls a few paragraphs out of the pages that come back, and writes an answer from those paragraphs — crediting the sites it used.

Two things follow from that. Your page has to turn up in an ordinary search in the first place, which is normal search marketing. And the particular paragraph it lands on has to make sense lifted out on its own, which is the new part.

What makes a passage citable

• It stands on its own. A paragraph that fully answers one question, without needing the three paragraphs before it, is the piece an assistant can lift.
• It is specific. “Improves performance” is unquotable. “Cut page load from 4.1 seconds to 1.3” is a sentence that can be repeated back with your name on it.
• It says where the fact came from. Claims that point at a proper source can be checked, and things that survive checking get quoted more than things that do not.
• It is laid out clearly. Comparison tables, plain definitions and headings written as actual questions get picked up far more reliably than the same facts buried in paragraphs.

The mistake to avoid

Inventing impressive-sounding statistics is worse than having none at all. These systems check claims against everything else they know, and a website that contradicts the known facts gets quietly marked down as unreliable — costing you the mentions you would otherwise have earned.