GEO: being described accurately in AI answers
GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is the work of making your company information easy for AI search tools and assistants to identify, trust and quote. Search engine optimization aims to put a page into a list of results. GEO aims for your brand to appear inside the generated answer.
Why this matters to exporters now
More overseas buyers begin supplier research by asking an AI assistant rather than opening a search results page. The question is increasingly "which Chinese suppliers make this product" rather than "which website should I visit". If your company cannot be described accurately by those tools, you are missing from the shortlist before any comparison begins.
What the work actually consists of
GEO is not a secret technique. It is a set of unglamorous, verifiable tasks, and most of them overlap with good SEO.
1. Make the website machine-readable
Implement Organization, Service, Product, FAQ and Breadcrumb structured data. Use semantic headings. Ensure the site returns complete HTML rather than relying on scripts to render the basics.
2. Make the facts consistent everywhere
Company name, founding year, address, registration details and service scope should match across your website, business registries, encyclopaedia entries, directories and social profiles. Contradictions between sources are the fastest way to lose trust.
3. Write content that can be quoted
State conclusions in the first sentence. Give specifications, tolerances, certifications, MOQ and lead times. A paragraph that can stand alone as an answer is more likely to be used as one.
4. Earn third-party references
AI systems prefer sources they can corroborate. Industry media coverage, association listings, directories and genuine customer references all contribute. Content farms contribute nothing, and can actively harm you.
How we measure it
Percentages you cannot reproduce are marketing. We use a fixed test that anyone can repeat.
- Define twenty questions based on what your buyers actually ask, covering your brand name, products, applications and selection criteria.
- Ask all twenty across the major AI assistants and search tools your market uses, recording each session.
- Record three things per response: whether you were mentioned, whether the description was factually correct, and which sources were cited.
- Repeat monthly with the same questions, and report the change.
What nobody can honestly promise
- Placement in AI answers on any particular platform
- "Tens of thousands of keywords" appearing in AI results within days
- Brand prominence inside an assistant's recommended shortlist
- That an AI platform will not change its behaviour next month
If a supplier offers any of the above as a guarantee, the guarantee itself is the product being sold.
Common questions
What is GEO, in one paragraph?
GEO is the work of making a company's information easier for AI search tools to identify, trust and quote. The fundamentals are the same as good SEO — correct technical structure, accurate and consistent facts, and content that answers questions directly — applied to a setting where the output is a generated answer rather than a list of links.
Do we need GEO if we already do SEO?
Much of the work overlaps, so you are not starting from zero. The additional effort is mainly in factual consistency across third-party sources and in structuring content as quotable statements. If your SEO work is done properly and your public information is consistent, a large part of GEO is already covered.
How long before we see change?
Corrections to your own website can be reflected within weeks once the pages are re-crawled. Changes that depend on third-party sources — media coverage, directory listings, encyclopaedia entries — typically take one to three months. AI models also update on their own schedules, which no supplier controls.
Is this relevant for a B2B exporter?
It is more relevant for B2B than for consumer retail, because B2B purchasing involves research and vendor comparison, and because the relatively small number of suppliers in most industrial categories makes accurate entity information disproportionately valuable.