Generative Engine Optimisation: How Your Brand Shows Up in ChatGPT

A meaningful share of business research queries now happen on AI assistants instead of search engines. 'Best CRM for UAE agencies?' 'Who are the top HR platforms in Dubai?' 'Compare Odoo and SAP for SME manufacturing.' The answers ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude give are shaping buying decisions. The discipline of influencing those answers — Generative Engine Optimisation — is the new SEO.

How AI answers are actually constructed

Modern AI assistants answer queries through a combination of training data (frozen at some past date, often months ago) and retrieved web content (live at query time, via the model's web access). For brand and product queries the retrieved content dominates — the model searches the web, reads what it finds, and synthesises an answer with citations.

Your goal is to be in the retrieved content, in a form the model can extract clearly, with the framing you want. The mechanics are different from SEO: ranking on Google matters less than being parseable, comprehensive and clearly attributed on the pages that get retrieved.

Content that gets quoted

AI assistants favour content that is structured, comprehensive and clearly written. Long-form articles with clear sub-headers, bulleted lists of capabilities, FAQs with direct question-answer structure, comparison tables — all of these are easier for a model to extract and cite than dense marketing prose. The same content that ranks well on Google for informational queries tends to be the same content that gets quoted in AI answers.

Practically: write the comprehensive guides. Include the comparison tables. Answer the FAQs in plain language. Make your product information easy to extract. Marketing copy that requires interpretation does worse than informational copy that just states the facts.

JSON-LD and structured data still matter

Beyond the content itself, machine-readable metadata helps. JSON-LD schema for Product, FAQPage, Article, Organization. Clear page titles and meta descriptions. Open Graph tags. Microdata where appropriate. AI assistants increasingly use this structured data to verify and contextualise the content they retrieve.

This is also where most companies fall short. The marketing site looks great visually but has no structured data underneath. The fix is mechanical and high-ROI — most CMS platforms and site frameworks have built-in support; it just needs to be turned on and configured.

Citations and authority compound

AI assistants weight authoritative sources higher. If your brand is cited by industry analyst reports, mainstream press, well-respected trade publications and government sources, you are more likely to be quoted positively. The investment in PR, analyst relations and thought leadership pays off in the AI search context too.

Companies that have built citation-rich brand presence over years are pulling ahead in AI search results, not just in Google. The compounding effect of authority is real and growing.

In closing

GEO is not separate from SEO; it is a layer on top of it. The fundamentals (good content, structured data, authoritative citations) overlap heavily. The practical work of optimising for AI answers is now part of the marketing operations baseline.