Generative engine optimization is the work of appearing inside the answer an AI writes, rather than in the list of links beneath it. We measure whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews name your company, find which sources they cite instead, and specify what to build.
GEO services for B2B and industrial companies. Measured across four engines, not estimated from one.
Generative engine optimization, usually shortened to GEO, is the practice of making a company appear in the answers AI systems write rather than only in the links beneath them. When a buyer asks who supplies something, the engine names a small number of companies. GEO is the work of being one of them.
The distinction matters because the outcome is different in kind. A search result is a list of ten and a click is a small victory available to all of them. A generative answer names three or four companies in a sentence, and everyone else is simply not in it. There is no page two.
This is also why the work is not a rebrand of search optimisation. The retrieval half is familiar: pages have to be reachable, parseable and fast, and links still signal which sources are worth drawing on. The synthesis half is not. An engine writing an answer needs a statement it can lift intact, attributed to a source it has reason to trust. A paragraph of adjectives about commitment to quality cannot be lifted. A sentence stating a tolerance, a capacity, a certification or a lead time can.
It overlaps substantially and it does not replace anything. What differs is the target, the number of winners, and what has to be true of a page for it to work.
The trap is assuming good rankings settle it. Ranking well means pages are being retrieved, which is the harder half of the problem. It says nothing about whether they are being quoted. In practice the companies most surprised by their AI measurement are the ones with the strongest search positions, because they had every reason to assume the two moved together.
By mention count, citation count and cited pages, tracked separately for each engine. Not blended into a single score, because the engines disagree and the disagreement is the finding.
| What we count | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Mentions, by engine | How often the company is named in an answer, and by which system |
| Citations | How often a page is used as a source, whether or not the brand is named |
| Cited pages | Which specific URLs the engines draw on. Often not the ones you would expect |
| Top cited sources | Which domains are being used to answer questions about your category |
| Share of answer | Your mentions against the named competitors in the same answers |
From our own measurement: a company we analysed in August 2026 was named forty-four times by ChatGPT and twice by Google AI Overview. One hundred and five mentions in total, and 1.9 percent of them in AI Overviews. The pattern is diagnostic rather than random. ChatGPT draws heavily on training data and third-party sources; AI Overviews reads live crawled pages. Their server was returning an error to crawlers on every URL. A single blended visibility score would have shown a healthy number and hidden the fault entirely.
That is the argument for measuring engines separately. They have different inputs, so a gap between them points at something specific. Blending them produces a number that goes up and down without telling anyone why.
Six causes account for most of it, and only one of them is about content volume.
A measurement, a diagnosis and a page-level specification. We do not build the pages unless asked separately, and we do not take a monthly retainer for watching numbers.
What nobody can honestly offer. You cannot edit the model, and no one can guarantee a position in an AI answer. What can be done is making pages retrievable, making statements quotable, resolving factual conflicts across sources, and publishing the specific answers buyers ask for. Those things measurably change citation frequency. Anything stated more confidently than that is describing a product that does not exist.
It is early, which is the argument for rather than against. The category is roughly eighteen months old and the competitive field is unusually thin.
Search optimisation is a mature discipline with entrenched positions and twenty years of accumulated authority defending them. Generative engine optimization has neither yet. The terms are winnable, the practices are unsettled, and most companies have not measured their position once.
That will not hold. The same thing happened to local search, to mobile, and to every surface that mattered before the market noticed. The window is open because the field is thin, not because the surface is unimportant.
The honest version of the urgency. Nothing catastrophic happens to a company that waits a year. What happens is that the work gets harder and the positions get more expensive, in exactly the way search positions did. If you are going to do this at all, doing it while the field is thin costs less than doing it later.
Send your domain and the names of three or four companies you actually compete with. We will measure all four engines, find who is being named instead of you, and send back what we find.
No charge for the first one. No call required, and nothing is owed.
Prepared for your company against the competitors you name. Written by the person who would run the paid work.
Or email contact@searchstanding.com directly.