Generative engine optimization services that get your brand named

Generative engine optimization is the work of getting a brand found, quoted and recommended by AI platforms that write answers from many sources, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. These platforms read widely, write something new, and put your name in the answer or they don't. GEO is how you become part of what they write. It covers the technical SEO underneath, clear and consistent details about your business, and pages built to be quoted, and it sits inside the broader work of AI SEO, which also covers traditional search.

Generative engine optimization works on the three steps an AI assistant takes before it names a business: it splits the buyer's question into several searches, pulls in pages for each one and scores the sections inside them, and tends to name the businesses that keep turning up across them. So the work is making it clear which business you are, writing sections that each answer one question well, and getting other sites to back up what you say. After a first search pulls in a set of pages, the AI reranks the sections inside them against each smaller search. Perplexity, for one, says it scores whole pages and the passages inside them. Sections that score well get quoted, and a page that keeps scoring well across more of a buyer's searches keeps getting used. One approach covers every AI platform, and we explain it in our post on how ChatGPT gets its information. It depends on pages where each section can be quoted on its own.

Traditional SEO optimizes a website for Google's organic index. AI SEO optimizes a brand's presence for the platforms that write answers, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews among them. The term is used both ways in the industry: using AI tools for SEO, where the AI is in the toolset and the target is still Google's index, and optimizing for AI search, where the target is the platform itself. Plate Lunch Collective does both. Traditional SEO is the foundation because organic rankings feed the indexes AI platforms pull from. But ranking on page one no longer guarantees a mention in AI answers. The overlap between Google's top ten results and AI citations has loosened, and the numbers are on our citation-ready content page. The work of making your business details clear and consistent, building pages to be quoted, and earning coverage on other sites, so these platforms find, quote and recommend a brand, is generative engine optimization.

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the broadest term, covering optimization across all generative AI search platforms. Answer engine optimization (AEO) focuses specifically on platforms that deliver direct answers: Google AI Overviews, voice assistants, and featured answer formats. Large language model optimization (LLMO) targets conversational AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. In practice these overlap significantly. The work underneath is the same: clear, consistent business details, pages where each section answers one question, and coverage earned on other sites. The difference is which platforms you put the most effort into. If your question is about Google's answer features specifically, that work lives at answer engine optimization.

Google’s guidance states that their AI features are rooted in their core search ranking and quality systems. For Google AI Overviews specifically, that is accurate. AI Overviews pull from Google’s own index through its core ranking systems, and Google says no special markup is needed to appear in them. Traditional SEO practices carry over to AI Overviews because Google built it on top of its existing systems. But Google AI Overviews is one platform. ChatGPT search sends questions to outside search providers, Microsoft among them, and reads sites through OpenAI’s own crawler. Perplexity, in a September 2025 write-up of its search system, says it runs its own crawler and index, and scores whole pages and the sections inside them, with its strongest ranking models at the last step. Siri now answers with Apple’s own models, built with Google’s Gemini (Apple, September 2026). Each platform has its own way of finding pages, its own way of choosing what to quote, and its own signals for deciding which brands to recommend. The overlap between Google’s top organic results and AI platform citations has loosened, so ranking alone doesn’t guarantee a mention. The SEO work still comes first: ChatGPT search runs its own crawler and uses outside search providers for some searches, and a site that’s hard to crawl or says different things in different places is hard for it to use. Google’s guidance is correct for Google, and the AI work builds on it for the other places your buyers ask.

ChatGPT draws from two sources: what it already knows from training and what it finds in real time when ChatGPT search sends questions to outside search providers, Microsoft among them. For established brands, ChatGPT may already have a picture of the brand from training that is out of date or wrong. For newer brands, it may have no picture at all. ChatGPT can answer from what it learned in training, and it searches the web some of the time. Getting mentioned takes both: clear, consistent details about your business and mentions on respected sites, which feed what ChatGPT already knows, and pages built so ChatGPT finds and quotes them when it searches.

It depends on the business, and the volume is small either way. Single-site and single-sector studies have reported large lifts. Studies across many sites disagree, from about the same as organic search to several times better, and one found AI visitors converting worse for B2B product sellers. We treat AI referral visits as a bonus, not the goal. The figures and their samples are in our AI search market share and referral traffic report.

Zero-click search is when a user gets their answer directly from the search interface without clicking through to any website. AI platforms accelerate this because they synthesize a complete answer from multiple sources in a single response. In the first four months of 2026, 68% of US Google searches ended without a click (SparkToro with Similarweb, June 2026). The buyer may never visit your site but still form an opinion about your brand based on whether and how you appeared in that answer. This is why AI search optimization measures citation rate and brand presence in AI responses, not just referral traffic. Visibility in a zero-click environment means being part of the answer, even when no click follows.

AI search optimization fits brands whose buyers research and compare before they choose, in categories AI platforms are already answering questions about. It works best where real expertise or a real track record already exists, because the work makes the expertise you already have clear to AI, and it can't invent expertise that isn't there. Brands with meaningful organic search revenue, an offering that gets evaluated against alternatives, and buyers who ask questions before they shortlist see the clearest return.

Every engagement is priced to the work, after we look at your market. Ongoing work starts at $1,500 a month, which usually fits a small local business. Most engagements cost more, depending on how crowded your market is, how many locations or products you want covered, how much work your site needs, and how much your own team can take on. Good SEO and AI search work takes real time, even with AI tools. If you'd like to see where you stand first, start with the AI Search Game Plan, a one-time plan from $1,500, ready in ten business days.

Yes. Your team knows your customers and your business in ways we'd take months to learn, so we do the specialist work and bring them into it as we go. How much your own team can take on is one of the things that moves the cost above the $1,500 floor, along with how crowded your market is and how much work your site needs.

The first cycle sets the baseline. We note the business numbers you already have, add tracking wherever calls or form fills go uncounted, and run a fixed set of buyer prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, plus Claude for software clients, recording whether the brand appears, which competitors appear and which sources those answers cite. What follows is scoped to what the baseline shows: fixing your business details and schema where records disagree, pages rewritten so each section answers one question, and earning coverage on other sites where they dominate the answers. The prompts run again every month, and at 90 days the business numbers join them in the first quarterly report.

AI visibility is measured as a chain, not a score. It begins with citation frequency against a fixed prompt set, tracked over time and against named competitors. It continues into AI referral traffic identified as a distinct channel in analytics rather than folded into direct or organic. It ends at your business numbers, like calls, bookings and sales, read against a baseline set before the work began. The three measures underneath are what the AI already knows about your brand from training, how often and how prominently AI finds and quotes your content when it searches, and whether AI recommends you by name without being asked (unprompted recommendation). A visibility score reported on its own is not evidence of business impact, and no measurement is meaningful without a baseline recorded before the work began. What each of these can and can't show is on the measurement page.

Partly. Google reports impressions from its own AI features, AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative features in Discover, inside Search Console, and Microsoft does the same for Copilot and Bing. Nobody reports citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude, so those have to be sampled directly. Our answer engine optimization page covers what Google and Microsoft built, and our measurement framework covers how we sample the rest.

Yes, and it stays part of the work rather than a stage before it. Technical health, crawlability, site architecture and indexing feed the indexes AI platforms pull from. In February 2025, Seer Interactive found 87% of citations in SearchGPT, ChatGPT's search prototype, matched Bing's top 20 results for the same question, so ranking and getting cited went closely together there. Across AI platforms more broadly the coupling has loosened. A brand whose site can't be crawled, or whose business details disagree from place to place, won't be found no matter how much generative engine optimization work goes on top, which is why we run the two together.

Ask for an inspectable baseline before any work is proposed: the specific buyer prompts that will be tracked, the current results across AI platforms, and which sources those answers cite today. Ask which business numbers they'll report against that baseline, such as calls, bookings and sales, rather than a proprietary score alone. Guaranteed placement or guaranteed citation in ChatGPT or Gemini is not something any agency can deliver, because the answers change from one ask to the next and no one controls them.