By Milod · 8 September 2026 · 2 min read · Fundamentals

What GEO means for your site, in plain terms

Generative engine optimisation is about being the source an assistant quotes. Here's what that changes about how you write.

Someone asks ChatGPT which running shoes suit beginners. It answers in a paragraph and cites three sites. Those three got the visit; everyone ranked fourth to tenth on Google got nothing. That is the shift generative engine optimisation responds to.

Ranking and being quoted are different jobs

Ranking rewards a page that satisfies a query better than the alternatives. Being quoted rewards something narrower: a passage an extractor can lift, attribute and trust. A page can rank tenth and still be quoted, because the model found one clean, checkable claim in it.

In practice this means the answer to the question should appear near the top of the page, phrased so it survives being pulled out of context. Burying it under 400 words of preamble costs you the citation even when it costs you nothing in rankings.

What assistants seem to reward

• A direct answer in the first paragraph, before any background.
• Specific, checkable claims: numbers, dates, named tools, real limits.
• Structure an extractor can follow: one idea per heading, short lists.
• Sources for anything contested, linked where the claim is made.
• Pages that stay current, since assistants favour what looks maintained.

What doesn't transfer

Keyword density, exact-match headings and thin pages built to catch long-tail traffic do nothing here. Neither does length for its own sake. A 3,000-word article that answers the question in paragraph nine is worse, for this purpose, than a 600-word one that answers it first.

A useful test: paste your page into an assistant and ask it the question you wrote the page for. If it can't answer from your text alone, an extractor won't either.

Where to start

Take the ten pages that already earn you search traffic and rewrite their openings to answer the question directly. That is usually a day of work and it is the single change most likely to get you cited, because those pages already have the authority assistants lean on.