GEO is not SEO with a new name. It measures something more specific: when someone asks about your field in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews, does the AI include you in the answer and include your link? The most common situation we encounter when doing audits for B2B clients is that the website is ranked in Google, but completely disappears from the AI answers. The following 15 questions are the most frequently asked by Taiwanese marketing and product leaders, arranged in order from concept, execution to budget.
Let’s make it clear first: what exactly is GEO?
GEO is the abbreviation of Generative Engine Optimization, which refers to a set of practices to make your content understood, trusted and cited by generative AI engines. The biggest difference with SEO is the target object: SEO strives for a link position on the search results page, and users have to click on it themselves; GEO strives for AI to generate answers, directly writing your opinions, numbers or practices into the reply, and marking the source. The battlefield of the former is ranking, while the latter is "written into the answer." So you may have a good ranking but not be cited, or you may have an average ranking but be often cited. The criteria are different on both sides.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Make web pages rank higher in Google and Bing results, with the goal of clicks.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): Make content suitable for being presented directly as answers, such as featured snippets and voice assistant replies.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Let content be referenced by generative models such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini into the answers it produces.
- LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization): almost synonymous with GEO, emphasizing LLM itself, and less popular.
People often ask if GEO is just hype, it’s enough to do a good job of SEO. My opinion is: the term will become obsolete, but the behavior of "users switching to AI to ask questions" will not go back. When evaluating software, Taiwanese B2B buyers are increasingly accustomed to asking ChatGPT "what marketing analysis tools are suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises" before deciding whether to enter the official website. GEO will not replace SEO. The two share the same content assets, but the end point of optimization is different. We don’t ask our clients to cut their SEO budget, but we allow the same article to both rank and be cited.
How does the AI engine decide who to cite?
The generative engine selects sources not by a single score, but by several layers of judgments stacked together. The first level is retrieval: the model or the search system behind it depends first on whether your content can be found and whether crawlers can read it. The second level is relevant and specific: when faced with a question, it prefers to choose a paragraph that directly explains the answer clearly, rather than going around three paragraphs of text that is still elaborating. The third level is credibility: is there a clear author, is there a number or source, and is the brand mentioned repeatedly elsewhere. This is why a brand that is often discussed in the industry is easier to quote because models have seen it so many times.
"I clearly have rankings, why doesn't AI cite me?" This is the most common sentence heard during audits. The reason is mostly due to content structure: your page is good enough for Google, but too difficult for AI to extract. For an article that hides the focus in the eighth paragraph and tells a story in each paragraph, it is difficult for AI to cut out a clean piece of text that can be directly pasted into the answer. On the contrary, if you put the conclusion at the beginning of the paragraph, use clear subscripts and lists, and make each paragraph its own unit that can be cited independently, the probability of being cited will be significantly increased.
Content and Technology: What to do to get cited
The most easily cited content has several things in common: it answers a clear question, gives a conclusion at the beginning, attaches specific numbers or steps, and is so self-contained that you don’t have to click on another page to understand it. Vacant "We are very professional" is meaningless to AI; sentences like "The GEO audit of Taiwan's B2B SaaS usually takes 30 days and covers five inspections" will be caught. Think of each article as a collection of "questions with clean answers" rather than an essay that needs to be read from beginning to end.
- Schema structured data: FAQPage, Article, Organization. These tags can help the engine understand what the page is talking about, and are particularly useful for Q&A content. It’s not a panacea, but it should be added.
- Readable by crawlers: Make sure that AI crawlers such as GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended are not blocked by robots.txt, and the content cannot be rendered solely by front-end JavaScript.
- llms.txt and clear information structure: Give the model an understandable content map, so that the title hierarchy, lists, and tables are clearly presented.
- Format: Structured formats such as FAQs, comparison tables, and step lists are indeed easier to extract than pure paragraphs, because they are inherently one question, one answer, one item, one value.
How to measure results and how long to wait
Traditional SEO looks at rankings and natural traffic; GEO looks at visibility and citations. In practice, we track several indicators: under a set of target questions, how often the AI engine mentions your brand, how often it attaches your link, the proportion compared with competing products, and whether the description of you in the answer is accurate. This is exactly what we are doing with Brand Radar, which is to poll mainstream AI engines for a batch of questions and turn "how many times have you appeared and how many times have your opponents appeared" into a curve that can be tracked instead of based on feelings. Without a baseline, you can't tell whether any changes are effective.
Let’s be honest about the schedule: GEO is not like advertising, it’s just there. It often takes weeks to months for content to be re-indexed, exposed to the model multiple times, and accumulated enough to change its canned answers. Our 30-day audit can give you a clear gap map and priorities in the first month, but the real climb in citations mostly occurs in the second to fourth months of continued content production. Any promise that "it will be the first choice for AI in two weeks" is questionable.
Don't ask "What's our GEO score?" Ask "When my customers asked AI these five questions, how many times did I show up." Visibility is relative, always look at it next to your opponent.— Tenten GEO Consulting Team
Do it yourself or find an agent?
B2B SaaS does GEO, and the difference from consumer brands lies in the shape of the problem. What buyers ask about AI is not which brand is good-looking, but "Does it support the integration of such and such?" "Is it suitable for a team of fifty people?" "How does it compare with a certain competing product?" The answers to these questions are clear and comparable, right in GEO’s sweet spot. Therefore, B2B content will focus on topics such as integrated lists, usage scenarios, real comparisons, and pricing logic that buyers really check when making decisions, rather than on brand stories. Your goal is to have the AI speak for you accurately when others compare software.
Whether you do it yourself or outsource it depends on whether you have someone who can stably produce content and understand the accuracy of the AI engine. The internal team is familiar with the product, but the difficulty is that it is difficult to take into account production, technical markup, and citation tracking at the same time; agencies have ready-made processes and measurement tools, but they should be chosen carefully and avoid companies that only change their names and are actually still doing old SEO. There is no single answer to budget, and it will vary depending on the content volume and competition level. Rather than asking about price, you should first figure out where your gaps are. If you want to know how AI currently answers questions about you and what opportunities it has missed for you, you can make an appointment for a 30-minute GEO diagnosis. We will run it using your real target questions and point out the gaps to you.
