Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of making your firm's website the source an AI answer engine quotes when a prospective client asks it a question. Traditional search engine optimisation (SEO) aims to rank a page in a list of links. GEO aims to have your words, your name and your firm appear inside the answer itself.
That matters because the answer is now where many Australians stop. Roy Morgan found 13.6 million Australians aged 14 and over, or 58%, used AI tools in an average four weeks in the March quarter of 2026. ChatGPT alone reached 10.5 million. Google reported in June 2026 that AI Overviews has more than 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode has passed one billion.
Below: how those engines pick their sources, why some Australian firms are cited and others are not, and the first five fixes for your own site.
How do AI answer engines choose which sources to cite?
AI answer engines do not "know" your firm. They search, retrieve a handful of pages, and write an answer from what those pages say. Google describes AI Overviews and AI Mode as "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems". Both use a technique Google calls query fan-out: issuing several related searches across subtopics, then selecting supporting pages while the response is generated. Perplexity's help centre describes the same loop: interpret the question, search the web, summarise, attach numbered citations.
ChatGPT search uses its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI states plainly that sites which opt out of it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers".
A Brisbane business owner asks ChatGPT how much a fractional CFO (chief financial officer) costs in Australia. Behind the scenes the engine runs several searches: typical monthly fees, what is included, how it differs from a bookkeeper. It then pulls back a small set of pages that answer each sub-question cleanly. The advisory firm whose pricing page states a monthly range in plain words gets cited. The firm whose page says "contact us for a tailored quote" gives the engine nothing to quote.
Structure and evidence on the page change the odds. A 2023 academic paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues, tested content changes against generative engines. It found they could boost visibility by up to 40% in responses, with the strongest gains from adding citations, quotations and statistics. The same paper notes the effect varies by domain, so treat the figure as direction, not a promise.
Is GEO just SEO under a new name?
Partly, yes, and Google says so. Whether GEO is "just SEO with extra steps" is the question SEO forums keep asking. Google's May 2026 guidance, reported by Search Engine Journal, answers it directly. In Google's words: "optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." The same documentation adds that no special files, "AI text files" or schema.org markup are needed.
| Aspect | Traditional SEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|
| What you are optimising for | A position in a list of links | Being quoted inside the AI answer |
| What success looks like | Clicks from page one | Your firm named, linked and paraphrased |
| Is it still required? | Yes, it is the entry ticket | Yes, once you are in the index |
What has changed is reader behaviour, and therefore the prize. Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025. People who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% when no summary appeared. Searches phrased as questions produced a summary 60% of the time.
So an accounting firm ranking fourth for "Division 7A loan explained" used to collect a steady trickle of clicks. Today the AI answer handles the explanation, and only the two or three firms it cites get the visit. SEO still gets you into the index, which is the entry ticket. GEO decides whether your page is the one quoted once you are in. The two stack; they do not compete.
Why are some Australian firms cited and others ignored?
In the AI Optimisation audits we run at AI Smarter in Sydney, three problems come up more often than any other.
The engine cannot read the page. Some firm websites are JavaScript applications that send an empty shell and build the page in the browser. Our own site was one of them: before we rebuilt aismarter.ai in 2026, crawlers received almost no text.
The guidance from Google is explicit that important content should be available in textual form. Crawling must also be allowed by robots.txt and by any CDN (content delivery network) or hosting layer. A security plugin that blocks "all AI bots" will quietly block OAI-SearchBot too.
The page has nothing quotable. That same May 2026 guidance contrasts commodity content ("7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers") with non-commodity content that only one author could have written. The professional services version is the "Why you need a will" page every estate lawyer publishes. Compare that with a page that walks through your firm's actual process, the documents you ask for, the typical turnaround, and what it costs. An engine assembling an answer needs specific sentences to lift. Generic pages offer none.
Nobody is standing behind the page. Answer engines are built on search systems that weigh who wrote a page and whether the firm behind it is verifiable. Pages with no named author, no credentials, no firm details and structured data (machine-readable page markup) that does not match the visible text look interchangeable. Interchangeable pages rarely get quoted.
What are the first five fixes for your own site?
They are ordered by effort, from an afternoon's work to a monthly habit.
1. Confirm the engines can read you
Open your robots.txt file (yourfirm.com.au/robots.txt) and check that Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot are not disallowed. OpenAI keeps its search crawler and training crawler separate. You can allow OAI-SearchBot to appear in ChatGPT answers while disallowing GPTBot if you do not want your content used for training. OpenAI says robots.txt changes take around 24 hours to take effect.
Then view the source of your homepage and one service page. If the text you see on screen is not in the HTML (the page's underlying code), your site is rendering in the browser and needs a server-rendered fix. Finally, open Google Search Console (Google's free site-reporting tool). In its June 2026 announcement, Google began rolling out insights on how pages appear in generative AI features, alongside a toggle to opt out. Make sure nobody in your firm has switched it off.
2. Answer the question in the first two sentences of every page
Because question-shaped searches are the ones most likely to trigger an AI answer, write each service page and frequently asked questions page as an answer rather than a brochure. A financial adviser's page headed "How much does a statement of advice cost?" should give the range in the first sentence and the caveats afterwards, not the other way around. If you would be comfortable seeing those two sentences quoted verbatim in ChatGPT with your firm's name beside them, they are written correctly.
3. Replace commodity pages with pages only your firm could write
Ask of each services or insights page: could a competitor have published this word for word? If yes, it is commodity content. Replace it with what you actually know. A management consultancy can publish the real agenda of its discovery workshop and what it found across its last twenty engagements. A tax practice can publish the questions it asks before a restructure and the traps it sees most often.
Add your own numbers where you have them, and cite the Australian Taxation Office, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission or the relevant professional body where you rely on theirs. Those are exactly the additions the GEO research above found most effective.
4. Put a named person and a verifiable firm behind every page
Give each substantive page an author with real credentials: Chartered Accountant or CPA (Certified Practising Accountant) status for accountants, a practising certificate for lawyers, Certified Financial Planner for planners. Make the firm's legal name, ABN (Australian Business Number) and address consistent across the site, your Google Business Profile and LinkedIn.
Add Organization and Person structured data, and follow Google's rule that everything in the markup must also be visible on the page.
5. Measure it monthly
Write down the ten questions prospective clients most often ask you. On the first of each month, ask them in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode, and record which firms are cited. Cross-check it against the new generative AI insights in Search Console. Where a competitor is cited and you are not, open both pages side by side and apply fixes two to four to yours.
What should a firm do first?
Start with fix one this week. It costs nothing, and it decides whether the other four can work at all. If your site is unreadable to the engines, that is a rebuild conversation rather than a copywriting one, and it is worth having before you spend money on content. You can see how we approached the same problem on our own site and for others on our work page.
For a plain-language read on how your site performs in ChatGPT, AI Mode and Perplexity, and which fixes apply to you, book a free initial AI consultation.