Every agency in India added the word GEO to its website this year. Very few can show you a citation. This guide explains what Generative Engine Optimization actually involves, so you can separate the operators from the opportunists before you sign anything.
What GEO is, in one paragraph
Search used to end at a list of links. Increasingly it ends at an answer: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and their peers read the web and compose a response, citing a handful of sources. GEO is the discipline of becoming one of those cited sources. It overlaps with SEO but is not the same job, a distinction we unpack in detail here.
What a real GEO engagement includes
Entity clarity: making sure machines know exactly who your brand is, what it does and how it relates to your category, through structured data, consistent naming and an llms.txt brand-facts file. Extractable content: claims written so a machine can lift them cleanly, with verifiable numbers and clean heading architecture. Citation-worthy assets: original data, honest guides and case studies machines prefer over marketing fluff. And measurement: tracking where your brand appears inside AI answers, not just where it ranks.
What the receipts look like
When GEO works, you can screenshot it. Our own benchmark: a finance client cited by name inside Google AI Overviews on competitive keywords, alongside a 63x organic click increase in sixty days. Any agency selling GEO should be able to show you something equivalent, and if they cannot, ask them to explain exactly what they will do in month one.
How to buy it wisely
GEO is not a standalone product; it rides on a sound SEO foundation and genuinely good content. Beware anyone selling it as a magic add-on. The right questions to ask are the same ones that expose any agency: these ten. If AI-era visibility is on your roadmap, our SEO and GEO practice treats citations as an engineered outcome, and we are happy to show the receipts first.