Generative Engine Optimization Best Practices: How to Get Found in the Age of AI

Your website ranks on Google. You have done the keyword research, built the backlinks, and watched your positions climb. But here is a question that probably keeps you up at night: when someone asks ChatGPT to recommend a business like yours, does your name ever come up?

For most business owners right now, the honest answer is no.

Search behavior has shifted fundamentally over the past eighteen months. People are no longer typing queries into Google and scrolling through ten blue links the way they used to. Instead, they are opening ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity, asking a complete question in plain conversational language, and walking away with a fully formed AI-generated answer. No clicking. No scrolling. No visiting your website at all unless the AI decides to cite you.

This shift represents a major evolution of SEO with generative AI one that every business owner needs to understand. Similarly, the generative AI impact on SEO is already visible in declining click-through rates and changing search behavior patterns.

But first, what actually is this GEO thing everyone is suddenly talking about?