A client looking for an employment lawyer in Mississauga or a physiotherapy clinic in Burlington may now ask ChatGPT before opening a single website, and on Google an AI Overview may sit above the usual results. Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the work of getting your firm named in those answers.

Where the term comes from

The name comes from "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization," a paper by Pranjal Aggarwal and five co-authors, posted to arXiv in November 2023 and published at the KDD 2024 conference. It calls tools that gather information from several sources and summarize it with a large language model "generative engines."

The authors took 10,000 queries, each paired with its top five Google results, had a language model rewrite one of those pages nine different ways, and measured how much of the generated answer cited that page and how near the top. Adding citations to credible sources, quotations and statistics did best. Keyword stuffing, the old SEO habit, was among the methods they classed as not performing, and what worked varied by subject.

Most of those queries were informational, not "who should I hire in Hamilton," and the test engine ran on GPT-3.5 Turbo. The paper shows that how a page is written affects whether an answer uses it. It doesn't show how a law firm or a clinic gets recommended.

What GEO means for an Ontario firm

For a publisher, visibility means being quoted. For a firm it's narrower. Someone asks "Who's a good family lawyer in Oakville?" or "Which contractors in Etobicoke do basement underpinning?", and the answer names you, describes you correctly and links to your site. Accountants and architects are in the same position.

How GEO differs from SEO, and where they overlap

The two overlap more than the new name suggests. Google's guide AI features and your website says AI Overviews and AI Mode have no additional technical requirements: a page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. Google adds that specific optimization isn't required, though the usual SEO fundamentals are still worth doing.

Google says both features may use "query fan-out," running several related searches across subtopics and data sources to build a response. OpenAI says ChatGPT's search sometimes rewrites a question into targeted queries for outside search providers. Its example turns "good restaurants near me" into "top restaurants San Francisco." So the plain search for your service and your city can still sit under the answer.

The difference is what you measure. SEO tracks rankings and clicks. GEO tracks the answer: whether you're named, how you're described and which sites it links to. Google counts AI Overview and AI Mode appearances inside the ordinary Web numbers in Search Console, and says AI Overviews often don't appear at all. A GEO check records the question, the tool and the date, because the next answer may differ.

What influences whether an assistant names a firm

Nobody outside these companies knows the full recipe. OpenAI says ChatGPT ranks search results using multiple factors and that placement isn't guaranteed.

Whether it can read your site

OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and that your host or content delivery network has to let its published IP addresses through. Blocking GPTBot, its training crawler, is a separate setting. Perplexity says much the same of PerplexityBot. Google's AI features are part of Search, so Googlebot's usual rules apply.

Whether your pages say it plainly

Google's practices for AI features include making important content available as text and keeping structured data in line with the visible text on the page. For a firm, that means one page per service, saying in plain sentences what you do, where and for whom. A fee schedule posted only as an image doesn't meet that test.

Whether your Google Business Profile is current

Google's AI features guide tells site owners to keep their Business Profile information up to date. For map results, Google says local ranking rests mainly on relevance, distance and how well known a business is, and that the last one draws on things like how many websites link to you and how many reviews you have.

What other sites say about you

This part is our observation, not a published rule. On October 1, 2026, we put 19 questions about hiring an agency to ChatGPT and Perplexity, and the 38 answers leaned on directories and review sites more than on agencies' own pages. The write-up is in how a Canadian firm gets recommended by ChatGPT, and how ChatGPT picks who to recommend covers the signals we check first.

What a firm can do itself

  1. Ask five to ten questions your clients ask, with your city in them, in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google. Note the date, who gets named and which sites are linked.
  2. Check your robots.txt for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot, and ask your host whether a firewall blocks them.
  3. Give every service its own page in plain sentences, with structured data that says the same thing.
  4. Keep your Google Business Profile complete, and your name, address and phone the same on every listing.
  5. Get listed on the directories that keep coming up in step one, and ask real clients to review you there.
  6. Publish only facts you can back up. The paper's best methods added sources, quotations and statistics, and those only help if they're real. A law firm's marketing must also be demonstrably true, accurate and verifiable under Law Society of Ontario Rule 4.2-1.
  7. Check again next month, and keep the dates.

How to check where you stand

If you'd rather not run step one yourself, the free visibility check asks ChatGPT and Google a handful of the questions your clients ask and sends you the answers, with the date and how we asked. Aroon checks every report before it goes out, usually the same business day.

The ongoing work is AI search optimization, part of SEO + AI Visibility at $1,500 a month, six-month minimum. That means a dated answer check, pages an assistant can quote, citations where assistants look, and a weekly re-check. We can't promise an assistant will name you. We can show you what it says today and what it says next month.

Questions owners ask

Is GEO the same as SEO?

It overlaps a lot. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode have no technical requirements beyond normal Search, and ChatGPT's search can turn a question into ordinary search queries. What changes is the measure: whether the answer names your firm, and how it describes you, on a given date.

Is GEO the same as AEO or AI SEO?

People use the terms loosely. Answer engine optimization, AI SEO and LLM SEO all aim at the same thing, being named in the answers AI tools write. GEO is the one that comes from a research paper, published at KDD 2024.

Can anyone guarantee ChatGPT will name my firm?

No. OpenAI says placement in ChatGPT search results isn't guaranteed, and Google says AI Overviews often don't appear at all. What someone can do is show you what the answers say today, work on the sources they draw on, and check again later, with dates.

Should my firm block AI crawlers?

Not the search ones. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and blocking GPTBot, its training crawler, is a separate choice. For AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google says the control is the same Googlebot setting that governs ordinary Search, because AI is built into Search.