Digital growth
In short
GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is work that makes your business easier for AI search tools such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Copilot to understand, trust and cite. Our GEO services cover entity consistency, original citable content, AI crawler access and third-party mentions, for businesses in India and worldwide whose buyers now research with AI.
Written by the Sumedicon team, Lucknow · Updated
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of improving how a business is represented in answers written by generative AI search tools. Instead of a list of ten links, these tools produce a paragraph or a short report, often with a handful of cited sources. GEO aims to make your website and your public information good material for those answers.
GEO does not involve tricking a model or buying placement. It works on the same things a careful researcher would look for: clear facts about who you are, original information that is worth quoting, pages the AI systems are allowed to read, and independent sources that confirm what you say about yourself.
Owners and marketing managers now hear from customers who say "I asked ChatGPT" or "Google gave me a summary". When they try the same question, their business is missing, described wrongly, or mentioned with an old address or a service they stopped offering years ago. Competitors, directories and review sites are cited instead.
That is uncomfortable because the buyer may never visit a website at all. They read the summary, shortlist two or three names and then make contact. If the AI tool cannot find clear, consistent information about your business, it cannot include you. GEO is the response to that problem: making sure accurate information exists, is accessible and is easy to attribute.
The details differ between tools and change often, but the broad pattern is similar. When a user asks a question, the system interprets it, often breaks it into several sub-queries, and retrieves pages from a search index or its own crawl. Google AI Overviews draws on Google's index, Copilot on Bing, and ChatGPT search and Perplexity on their own and partner indexes. The model then reads the retrieved passages, writes a combined answer, and links some of the sources it relied on.
Two things follow from this. First, a page that is not indexed or cannot be fetched is invisible to the process. Second, the model favours passages that state facts plainly and can be attributed, because it has to compress many sources into a few sentences. Vague marketing copy gives it nothing to use. Specific, well-structured, verifiable information does.
Each engagement is scoped in writing after discovery. The usual building blocks are listed below; not every business needs all of them.
Many sites block AI crawlers without anyone deciding to. A security plugin, a CDN setting or a copied robots.txt file may refuse bots like GPTBot or PerplexityBot. Others allow everything without thinking about it. Neither is wrong in itself, but it should be a deliberate choice. Some crawlers fetch pages for live search answers, while others collect data for model training, and you may want to treat them differently.
We review your robots.txt, server rules and CDN settings, explain what each AI user agent is used for according to its publisher, and implement the policy you choose. We can also add an llms.txt file, a plain-text summary that lists key pages for language models. Support for llms.txt varies and is not confirmed by every provider, so we present it as low-cost housekeeping, not a guarantee of anything.
The process follows our usual pattern. Discovery over video and a baseline AI visibility review lead to a written scope and a fixed quote agreed before work begins. Work then runs in two-week cycles: one cycle might fix entity data and markup, the next might rewrite core service pages to be more citable, the next might correct robots.txt rules. Code changes are tested and reviewed, and each cycle ends with a demo of what changed.
Measurement is the honest weak point of GEO. AI tools do not provide a Search Console equivalent, answers change between runs, and they vary by user and location. We track what can be tracked: citations and mentions from our repeatable prompt set, referral traffic from AI tools in your analytics, AI Overview appearances where tools report them, and crawler activity in server logs. We present these as indicators of direction, and we never guarantee that a tool will cite or recommend you.
GEO matters most when buyers compare suppliers through research before they make contact. A hospital administrator comparing patient CRM vendors, a school evaluating ERP software, a homebuyer researching developers in a city, a manufacturer looking for a logistics partner, or a finance team looking for a software firm will increasingly start with an AI tool. Startups and SaaS founders in new categories also benefit, because AI tools need clear material to explain what the product is.
If your business already has a sound SEO base, GEO is a sensible next step. If the site has serious indexing or speed problems, we recommend fixing those first, because AI search tools depend on the same crawlable web.
Our tools are Google Search Console, Lighthouse, Screaming Frog, server log review and JSON-LD structured data, plus manual testing in each AI tool. Because we are a software company working in PHP, Laravel, Node.js, Python, React and Next.js, we can make the technical changes ourselves, including rendering fixes for JavaScript-heavy sites that AI crawlers may not execute.
Cost depends on the number of pages to rework, how inconsistent your current entity information is, how many profiles and directories need correcting, the technical access we have, and how many AI tools and prompts you want tracked. A fixed quote follows discovery. Timing is uncertain by nature: crawler and markup fixes take effect as tools recrawl, but changes in how AI answers describe you typically take several months, and some sources update slowly.
SEO makes pages crawlable, relevant and competitive in traditional search results. AEO structures content so that one passage can be chosen as the direct answer to one question. GEO looks at the whole picture an AI tool forms about your business from many sources, including sites you do not own, and aims to make that picture accurate and well supported.
They are layers, not alternatives. SEO provides the access and trust, AEO provides clean answers, and GEO adds entity consistency, citable depth and outside confirmation. Most businesses get the best return by treating them as one programme with shared reporting.
FAQ
No one can honestly promise that. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews decide what to say using their own systems, and their answers vary between users and over time. We improve the inputs they rely on, such as accurate entity information, citable content, crawler access and third-party mentions, and then track citations and mentions where tools allow.
It depends on your goals. Blocking crawlers that fetch pages for AI search answers can remove you from those answers, while blocking crawlers used mainly for model training may have less effect on visibility. We explain what each user agent does according to its publisher, discuss your concerns about content reuse, and set rules that match the policy you choose.
An llms.txt file is a plain-text file at the root of your site that lists and briefly describes your most important pages for language models. It is a proposed convention, and not every AI provider has said it uses the file. Because it is cheap to create and maintain, we often add one, but we do not treat it as a ranking factor.
We run a fixed set of prompts across the main AI search tools at regular intervals and record whether your business is mentioned, how it is described and which sources are cited. We add AI referral traffic from analytics, crawler activity from server logs and AI Overview data where tools report it. These show direction rather than exact numbers.
GEO overlaps with SEO but adds real differences. SEO focuses on ranking your pages in result lists. GEO focuses on how AI tools describe your business across many sources, so it puts more weight on entity consistency, third-party mentions, crawler policy for AI user agents and content written to be quoted. Strong SEO remains the foundation for both.
Technical changes such as crawler rules and structured data can take effect within weeks, once AI tools and search engines recrawl your site. Changes in how AI answers describe your business typically take several months, because they depend on many sources, some of which update slowly. We share the baseline and each re-run so you can follow progress.
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Based in Lucknow, working with businesses across India and worldwide. Email info@sumedicon.in, Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 6 PM IST.
