What is GEO and why should your SME know about it now?

Anyone looking for an accountant, a roofer or a software partner today increasingly types that question into ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini. In Google itself, too, the top of the results often shows a summary written by AI. The question for an SME is shifting as a result: are you on the first page of Google? Are you also named in the answer an AI service gives? That second part is called GEO.

What GEO means exactly

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It is the work that ensures generative search services know your business, describe it correctly and include it as a source or recommendation in their answers. The term comes from research by Princeton and other universities, published at the KDD conference in 2024. In that research on Generative Engine Optimization, the authors argue that targeted changes to a text can increase visibility in AI answers by up to 40%.

The services in question:

• ChatGPT, with its search feature that consults the web live
• Perplexity, which shows numbered sources with every answer
• Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, above the regular search results
• Gemini, Google's assistant

The difference from SEO

SEO revolves around a place in a list of ten blue links. The visitor chooses which link to click and compares afterwards. With an AI answer, that comparison largely happens beforehand: the service reads a range of sources, summarises and names a few businesses. Anyone who is not among them does not feature in the customer's decision.

The two disciplines overlap considerably. Google writes in its explanation of AI features that a page must be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet in search results in order to show up as a source in AI Overviews. A technically sound site therefore remains the foundation. GEO adds a layer on top: clear facts about your business, answers to the questions customers really ask and mentions on other sites that an AI service regards as reliable.

How AI search engines choose their sources

No AI service publishes its full selection method. From what the providers themselves document and from independent research, a few consistent patterns do emerge:

• Access. The service's crawler must be allowed to read your site. A misconfigured robots.txt silently shuts you out.
• Clarity. A page that says in one paragraph what you do, for whom and where is easier to cite than a page full of slogans.
• Confirmation. An AI service weighs what others write about you. A mention in a trade journal, a Unizo member list or a recognised review site counts.
• Structure. Subheadings, short paragraphs and structured data make it easier for a language model to find the right passage.

What a mention is worth

A mention in an AI answer often brings fewer clicks than a top position in Google. The visitors who do click through, however, are further along in their decision. A Semrush study from 2025 calculated that the average visitor from an AI search service is worth 4,4 times as much as the average visitor from traditional organic search results, measured by conversion rate. The explanation is logical: someone who reaches you via ChatGPT has already compared the options.

The volume is growing fast. Previsible analysed the traffic of 19 websites and saw visits from AI services rise by 527% in the first five months of 2025, compared with the same period in 2024. The figures are in their analysis on Search Engine Land. That is a small sample, so read it as a direction for the market as a whole.

Why you should start now

Two signals make it urgent. In a press release from December 2023, Gartner predicted that brands' organic search traffic will fall by 50% or more by 2028, as consumers switch to searching with generative AI. Whether that exact percentage materialises will become clear in the coming years. The growth in AI traffic above points in the same direction.

The second signal is that few companies are already measuring what their GEO work delivers. According to an eMarketer survey from January 2026, summarised in this report by The Digital Bloom, only 23% of marketers invest in measuring GEO. For a Flemish SME, that means a lead that is still there for the taking: in many sectors and regions, not a single competitor has yet got their business in order for AI services.

We work from Ghent for SMEs across Flanders. In a first measurement we often see the same pattern: the site is fine for Google, while AI services do not name the business, give an outdated address or recommend a competitor.

What you can do now

• Put five questions your customers really ask to ChatGPT and Perplexity, for example "which heat pump installer would you recommend in the Kortrijk area?". Note whether your business is mentioned and what is said about it.
• Open your robots.txt (yourdomain.be/robots.txt) and check whether there are rules that keep AI crawlers out.
• Read your own homepage as if you were an outsider: does the first paragraph say what you do, for whom and in which region?

Want to know where you stand? Request the free AI analysis. If your website itself is due for a refresh, our sister agency hetdesignbureau.be can help you further.