What generative engine optimization is
When someone asks an assistant “which SEO consultant in Kathmandu should I hire”, “best trekking company for Manaslu” or “compare remittance apps for sending money to Nepal”, the assistant either answers from what it learned in training or, increasingly, runs a live search, retrieves a handful of pages and composes an answer with citations. Generative engine optimization, one of the four services under my AI search optimization hub and part of my SEO services, is the work of being among the pages retrieved, being described accurately, and being the brand named when the question is a recommendation. Much of it is familiar: the pages assistants cite are overwhelmingly pages that already rank, answer clearly and are corroborated elsewhere. What is new is the weight of off-site mentions and entity consistency, and the difficulty of measuring anything precisely.
Who this is for
- Brands whose buyers now ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for recommendations before searching Google, common in software, professional services, travel planning and eCommerce research.
- Companies in Australia, the UK and the USA whose competitors are being named in assistant answers and who are not.
- Businesses that have been described wrongly by an assistant (old address, discontinued product, wrong founder) and want the sources corrected.
- Nepali businesses selling abroad, where the buyer’s first question to an assistant often includes “in Nepal” and the answer is drawn from whatever directories and articles exist.
What has evidence, and what does not
| Supported by evidence and by my own tracking | Plausible but unproven | Sold widely, no evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Pages that rank well in Google and Bing are far more likely to be retrieved and cited by assistants that search live. | That particular content formats (statistics, quotations, expert attribution) raise citation rates across all assistants; early studies show effects that vary by system. | That a special file, tag or “AI-optimized” writing style guarantees inclusion. |
| Clear, direct answers with specific facts are quoted more often than vague marketing copy. | That mentions on Reddit, Quora and forums directly raise brand recommendations; the correlation is visible, the mechanism is not. | That an assistant has a stable ranking that can be bought or engineered. |
| What assistants say about a brand reflects what third-party sources say: directories, reviews, press, Wikipedia-class references, industry lists. | That freshness signals (recent dates, updated content) influence retrieval strongly. | That blocking or allowing AI crawlers changes rankings in Google. |
| Consistent entity data across your site and profiles reduces wrong descriptions. | That structured data is read directly by assistants rather than through the search index. | Precise “AI visibility scores” from any tool; they are samples. |
I apply the first column, test the second where it is cheap to do so, and decline to sell the third.
What the GEO service includes
- Prompt set and baseline: the recommendation and answer prompts a buyer would use, sampled across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google’s AI features, with your presence, your competitors’ and the sources cited recorded. Delivered through the AI visibility audit.
- Source mapping: which third-party pages the assistants actually cite for your category (directories, review sites, comparison articles, industry bodies, news), and which of them mention you, mention you wrongly, or omit you.
- Retrievability: making sure your key pages rank, are crawlable by the assistants’ crawlers (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) where you want them to be, load fast and contain the answer in the HTML, through my technical SEO service.
- Citable content: pages that give an assistant a reason to cite you rather than a competitor: original data, clear comparisons, specific prices and processes, expert-attributed explanations, using the answer-first structure from the answer engine optimization service.
- Off-site presence: listings, profiles, reviews, press and mentions in the sources the assistants draw on, corrected where wrong and added where missing, through the outreach on my link building page.
- Entity consistency: one set of facts about the business across the site, Google profile, LinkedIn, directories, Wikidata where eligible, and structured data.
- Re-sampling and reporting: the prompt set re-run monthly, changes recorded with the method, and AI referral traffic from GA4 reported alongside.
How GEO work runs
- Baseline audit with the prompt set, source map and referral data.
- Foundation: rankings, crawlability, structured data and entity consistency fixed first, because nothing else works without them.
- Content: the pages most likely to be retrieved for the prompt set rewritten or created to be citable.
- Off-site: corrections and additions to the sources that shape the answers, in order of how often they are cited.
- Monthly cycle: re-sample, report, adjust. Expect movement over months, with noise between samples; I show the trend rather than a single reading.
What you receive
- The baseline report: prompt set, presence, competitors, cited sources and referral traffic.
- The source map with the corrections and additions planned.
- Technical, content and entity fixes implemented or briefed.
- Monthly re-sampling with the method stated, and referral and ranking data alongside.
GEO work is included at the Enterprise tier on the SEO packages and pricing page and available as a project. For the background in plain language, read the AI search optimization guide.
Next step
Request a free AI visibility check and I will sample ten recommendation prompts for your category across the main assistants and report where you appear, where competitors appear and which sources are shaping the answers. All related work is under SEO services.