Existing in the answers
people no longer click.

We look at what answer engines say today about you and about your market. We ask the questions your customers would ask, across several tools, and we note who is cited, on what, and with which errors. That survey is the starting point, and it is often instructive: companies discover they are being described with outdated information.

We then identify what makes a source quotable. An engine composing an answer needs material it can take up without risk: a clear statement, dated, attributable, that does not contradict itself from one page of your site to the next.

Finally we correct what prevents you from being taken up: pages that drown the information in filler, figures with no source, internal contradictions, a company identity that blurs from one directory to another.

This discipline is a few years old, it is sold with a great deal of assurance, and that assurance is not justified. Better to set out the limits before describing the method.

Nobody knows the criteria

Generative answer engines do not publish how they choose their sources, and those mechanisms change often. What we apply comes from observation and from what the publishers document publicly, not from any known internal workings.

Measurement is immature

When an engine cites you, that does not necessarily produce a visit, so your usual tools do not see it. Instruments that track those citations exist, they are recent and imperfect. We record part of this work by hand, and we tell you so rather than manufacture a reassuring dashboard.

A large part of it is search optimisation done properly

A site that is slow, badly structured, whose information is drowned, does not get taken up. Those are the same requirements as classic search optimisation. Selling GEO as an entirely new discipline is commercially convenient and inaccurate.

What is genuinely specific amounts to few things, and those are the ones we work on.

An engine composing an answer is looking for material it can take up without getting it wrong. A few characteristics come up regularly in what gets used.

The answer comes straight away

A page that opens with three paragraphs of introduction before reaching the subject is hard to quote. The ones that get used answer in the first few lines, then develop.

The statement is attributable

A figure with no source and no date is a risk for an engine that has to stay credible. A figure that is dated, sourced and verifiable can be reused. That applies to your own figures too: better a few solid data points than many unverifiable claims.

The site does not contradict itself

If three pages give three versions of your offering or your lead times, none of them is reliable. Internal consistency counts for more here than in a classic ranking, where each page stands on its own.

The company is identifiable

Same name, same address, same description everywhere you appear. A blurred identity from one directory to another stops an engine connecting the information together.

The structure is explicit

Structured data is not a magic criterion, but it removes ambiguities an engine would otherwise have to guess at. It costs little and it cannot hurt.

The question comes up every time: should the two be treated separately. The honest answer is that most of it overlaps.

What is common

A site that is accessible, fast, properly structured, whose content genuinely answers a question. Those requirements serve both, and a company whose search optimisation has been neglected has no reason to start with GEO.

What genuinely differs

Search optimisation seeks a ranking, GEO seeks to be taken up. A ranking is won page by page; being taken up depends on the consistency of the whole and on the confidence the source inspires. Beyond that, a citation does not necessarily produce a visit: the value may be a mention with no click, which changes how the result is judged.

Our position

We do not sell GEO to a company whose search optimisation is not in order, because the second is the foundation of the first. In that case we start with search optimisation, and GEO comes afterwards.