Your customers have started asking AI for recommendations. Are you in the answer?

Something has shifted in the last couple of years, quietly and quickly. A growing number of people, when they want a recommendation, no longer open Google and scroll. They ask an AI. They type "who’s a good accountant in Tauranga for a small business" into ChatGPT, or they ask Perplexity for the best plumber in their suburb, and they get back a short, confident answer with a handful of names.

If your business is one of those names, you’re in a remarkable position. The customer has been handed you as the answer, not one of ten blue links to compare. If you’re not one of those names, you’re invisible in a way that’s brand new and easy to miss, because it doesn’t show up in your old analytics at all.

Getting into those answers is what Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, is about.

How AI answers are actually built

It helps to understand, roughly, what’s happening when an AI recommends a business. These tools have read an enormous amount of the public web, and when asked a question, they assemble an answer from what they’ve absorbed and, increasingly, from live searches they run in the moment.

So the businesses that get recommended tend to be the ones that are described clearly, consistently, and in plenty of places. If your business is explained well on your own site, and the same facts about you appear consistently across directories, profiles, and mentions elsewhere, an AI has a clear, confident picture of who you are and what you do. If your online presence is thin, vague, or contradictory, the model has nothing solid to go on, and it reaches for a competitor it understands better.

GEO and SEO are cousins, not twins

A lot of good SEO practice helps with GEO, which is convenient. Clear, well-structured content. Honest, specific information about what you do and where. Consistent business details everywhere you appear. Content that answers real questions in plain language. All of this feeds both traditional search and AI answers.

But there are differences worth knowing. Traditional SEO is partly a competition for position, climbing a ranked list. GEO is more about clarity and consistency, making sure the machine understands you well enough to mention you with confidence. You’re not fighting for the top of a list so much as making sure you exist clearly enough to be included at all.

What you can actually do about it

This is a new and fast-moving field, and anyone claiming certainty is overselling. But the sensible groundwork is clear enough.

• Describe your business plainly and specifically on your own site. What you do, who for, where, and what makes you a sensible choice. Vague is invisible.
• Answer real customer questions in your content. The questions people ask AI are often the questions you could be answering on your blog.
• Keep your details consistent everywhere. Name, address, phone, services, the same across your site, your Google Business Profile, and every directory. Contradictions confuse the machine.
• Use structured data. The behind-the-scenes markup that spells out, in a format machines read cleanly, exactly what your business is.
• Earn honest mentions. Being referred to elsewhere on the web, in real and relevant places, strengthens the picture.

Why now, and not later

The reason to pay attention now is that this is still early. The businesses that get described clearly and consistently over the next while are the ones the AI tools will reach for as this way of searching becomes ordinary. It’s a quiet head start that’s available right up until everyone notices, at which point it stops being a head start.

We build GEO into the ongoing work for clients who want it, alongside traditional search, because being findable now means being findable in both places. If you’d like to be in the answer when your customers start asking the machine, that’s a conversation worth having sooner rather than later.