GEO explained: mostly good SEO, made quotable

If you run a small business in Ireland, someone may have told you that you need GEO, or generative engine optimisation, to show up in ChatGPT and in Google's AI answers. The term is real and the research behind it is worth knowing. The honest version is less dramatic than the sales pitch: most of GEO is good SEO, plus pages that say specific things an AI tool can quote.

Where the term GEO comes from

The phrase comes from a research paper called "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization", first posted in November 2023 by a Princeton-led team and accepted to the KDD 2024 conference (arXiv, revised June 2024). It asked a fair question: if an AI writes the answer, how does a website become one of its sources?

Since then the label has been stretched to cover almost anything. So start with what the company behind the search engine most people in Ireland use actually says.

Google says it is still SEO

Google's documentation is blunt. On its "AI features and your website" page (Google Search Central, last updated 10 December 2025), it says: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." The same page says there is no special schema.org structured data you need to add.

In May 2026 Google published a fuller guide to its generative AI features in Search. It states that "optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." It adds that you do not need to write in a special way for AI, that there is no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces, and that you should "Create the content yourself based on what you know about the topic". On 15 May 2026 Google also confirmed that its spam policies apply to AI responses.

In June 2026 Google added a note to that guide about llms.txt, a proposed text file meant to guide AI tools. Google Search ignores such files, so they neither help nor harm your visibility there.

What the Princeton paper actually measured

The GEO paper is often quoted as proof that a few edits can raise AI visibility "by up to 40%". The figure is real, but it comes from a 2023 lab test, and the test behind it matters. The authors built a set of 10,000 queries and tested nine kinds of content edit on a simulated answer engine built on GPT-3.5, which read the top five Google results for each query. They repeated part of the test on Perplexity with 200 queries. Visibility meant how much of the AI answer drew on a source, weighted by where in the answer it appeared.

Adding quotations, adding statistics and citing sources did best. Keyword stuffing gave little or no gain, and on Perplexity it did about 10% worse than leaving the page alone. The finding most useful to a small business is that, in the same lab test, lower-ranked sources gained the most from these edits, while the top-ranked source lost about 30% on average.

The limits are the authors' own: two engines, 2023-era models, and no measurement of what happened to normal search rankings. Treat it as a 2023 lab result, not a forecast for Google or ChatGPT in 2026.

How many people are actually using AI

The CSO's Household Digital Consumer Behaviour 2025 release, published on 5 December 2025, found that 42% of Irish internet users aged 16 and over had used generative AI in the previous three months. Use was far higher among younger people: 72% of men aged 16 to 29, against 9% of men aged 75 and over. That measures general AI use, not people asking an assistant to find a business.

Where people search has moved less than the headlines suggest. Google handled 93.47% of search engine use in Ireland in September 2026, according to StatCounter.

What happens to clicks

A careful click study comes from Pew Research Center (22 July 2025). It tracked the Google searches of 900 US adults through March 2025. People clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits to a results page with an AI summary, against 15% on pages without one. Only 1% of visits included a click on a link inside the summary itself.

Pew is clear that this shows an association, not a cause, and it is American data from a single month. Nobody has measured the same thing in Ireland. Still, when an AI answer covers the question, being one of its cited sources plausibly matters more than it used to.

What the 2026 trials found works

Newer research changes one thing at a time, which makes it more useful. A paper presented at SIGIR 2026 in Melbourne in July 2026 (Vishwakarma, Kumar and Jamidar, "What Gets Cited") ran 252,000 controlled trials across six AI models and 18 content factors.

Relevance to the question and position in the list of sources mattered most. After that, explicit price information and a recent date helped consistently. Completeness and trust cues helped a little. In the authors' words, "formatting-only edits have little impact".

These were controlled tests, not a live search engine, but the direction matches Google's advice: say specific things. A line such as "Rewires from €950, Laois and Kildare, updated October 2026" gives a model something to repeat. "Competitive rates" gives it nothing.

Directories and listings still carry weight

AI tools cite listings as well as business websites. In BrightLocal's study of 800 manual ChatGPT local searches across 20 US cities (published December 2024), 58% of sources were business websites, 27% were mentions of the business and 15% were directories. For one trade term, "best electrician", 62% of sources were directories.

A later BrightLocal study (August 2026), covering 60,970 checks of Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT for business locations in the US, the UK and Australia, found that Google Business Profile was the most cited single source, at over a quarter of citations. ChatGPT leaned heavily on Yelp, which matters far less in Ireland, so do not read that as advice to chase Yelp here.

The lesson for an Irish business is narrow. Claim and correct your Google Business Profile, then the one or two directories that appear when you search your trade and your town.

AI crawlers and your robots.txt

Your robots.txt file tells crawlers which parts of your site to stay out of. The AI companies run separate crawlers for separate jobs. According to each company's own documentation, checked in October 2026:

• GPTBot collects content that OpenAI says "may be used in training" its models. Blocking it does not remove you from ChatGPT search. That job belongs to a different crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI says sites that block it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers".
• Google-Extended controls whether content Google crawls may be used to train Gemini models and for grounding. Google says it has no effect on inclusion or ranking in Google Search. AI Overviews and AI Mode are part of Search and follow Googlebot and the normal snippet controls, so blocking Google-Extended does not take you out of them.
• PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity's search results, and Perplexity says it "is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models".

Blocking a training crawler is a separate decision from blocking a search crawler, which stops that tool citing you. If your site sits behind Cloudflare, check its AI crawler settings as well: Cloudflare announced on 1 July 2026 that customers who block its Training category can also block mixed-use crawlers such as Googlebot.

What you cannot buy

• A ranking in ChatGPT. There is no position for sale. Google's page on third-party SEO tools and services (Google Search Central, updated June 2026) says using a service or tool does not guarantee ranking success, and lists "Promising improvements for AI experiences and search formats" among the claims to be wary of.
• Schema as a lever. Google says structured data is not required for its AI features and that markup must match what the page visibly says. FAQ rich results stopped showing in Google Search in May 2026.
• Mass directory submissions. The listing studies point to a small number of accurate profiles on sites AI tools actually cite, not hundreds of pages nobody visits.
• An llms.txt file as a fix. Google says it ignores llms.txt, and no major AI assistant has said it uses one to choose sources. It costs little to add, but do not pay for it.

Checks you can run this month

1. Open the Generative AI report in Search Console. Under Performance, then Generative AI, Google shows which of your pages appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by country, device and date. Google says it reached all websites by late August 2026. It shows impressions only, and those are already counted in the normal Web report, so do not add the two together.
2. Ask the assistants about yourself. In ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Mode, ask "What does [business] in [town] do?", "Who would you recommend for [service] in [town]?" and "How much does [service] cost in Ireland?". Note wrong details, missing services and which websites are cited. Ask each one twice, because answers vary.
3. Read your robots.txt. Visit yourdomain.ie/robots.txt. Look for Disallow: / under User-agent: *, and for any block on Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot.
4. Check Cloudflare, if you use it. In the dashboard, look at the AI crawler settings and whether Training is blocked.
5. Run the visible specifics test. Could a stranger find your prices or starting price, the areas you serve, your hours, your turnaround and your credentials in the visible text of your pages?
6. Audit your listings. Search your business name. Check that your Google Business Profile is claimed and accurate, then fix the one or two directories that appear for your trade and town.
7. Look for AI referrals in GA4. Under Reports, Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition, filter the source for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com to see real visits from assistants.
8. Confirm the basics. Search site:yourdomain.ie and check the Pages report in Search Console. A page that is not in Google cannot be cited in an AI Overview.