Buyers are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude for vendor recommendations — and those AI systems have already decided which brands to mention. ClickBreeze builds the content authority, earned media, and brand entity signals that make AI platforms consistently cite and recommend your business.
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of building the content authority, earned media presence, and brand entity signals that cause large language models — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI — to cite and recommend your brand when users ask for advice, vendors, or solutions.
The term was formalised in a 2023 paper by researchers at Princeton University, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI, and IIT Delhi. Unlike SEO, which positions URLs on a results page, GEO positions your brand inside the AI-generated answer itself — before the user ever sees a link. With ChatGPT processing over 2 billion queries daily, AI-generated brand discovery is no longer a future consideration.
ChatGPT processes over 2 billion queries daily and has doubled its user base in under a year. A growing share of those queries are commercial — asking for vendor recommendations, product comparisons, and service advice your brand could be answering.
Research shows only 11% of domains appear in citations on both platforms — meaning 89% of brands visible on one AI platform are completely invisible on the other. Without a cross-platform GEO strategy, most brands are losing half the AI-generated brand discovery market.
Research identifies "fact density" — the inclusion of specific statistics, named data sources, and verifiable figures — as one of the strongest predictors of AI citation. Content without statistics is consistently ranked below fact-rich sources by LLM retrieval models.
The majority of brand citations in AI responses originate from third-party sources — press coverage, review sites, industry roundups, and editorial mentions. What other credible sources say about your brand carries far more weight with AI than your own website claims.
From auditing your current AI Share of Voice to building the earned media and content signals that move the needle — every layer of a cross-platform GEO strategy.
Before optimising, you need to know where you stand. We run hundreds of commercially relevant prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Bing Copilot — mapping which brands are being recommended for your target queries, where you appear, where your competitors appear, and what content sources are being cited over you. This forms the foundation of every GEO engagement.
We overhaul your existing content to meet the information standards that LLMs use when selecting sources — adding verifiable statistics with named sources, original research, direct answer formatting, and data tables. Adding statistics produces a 41% visibility lift in AI responses. We also ensure OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT's crawler) is not blocked in your robots.txt and that pages are structured for clean AI extraction.
84% of AI citations come from earned media — not owned content. We run digital PR campaigns that earn coverage on the editorial domains, industry publications, and third-party review platforms that AI systems trust and draw from most. National press, sector-specific trade publications, Reddit AMAs, and high-authority review sites all contribute to the external signal landscape that determines AI recommendations.
We establish and strengthen your brand's entity presence across the web — Wikipedia entries, Wikidata profiles, Google Knowledge Panel optimisation, and consistent brand mention presence across the directories, review platforms, and industry sources that AI training data draws from. We also monitor the sentiment context around brand mentions, ensuring your brand is associated with the specific expertise areas and positive attributes that influence AI recommendations.
High-intent GEO queries follow patterns like "What is the best alternative to [Competitor]?" or "Which [service] agency should I use in the UK?" We create and optimise content for these comparison and alternative query formats — ensuring your brand appears prominently with specific, verifiable differentiators, clear positioning, and structured content that AI retrieval models extract and cite in competitive recommendation responses.
We track your AI Share of Voice across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Bing Copilot on a monthly basis — running your target commercial prompts, recording citation frequency, and tracking movement against named competitors. We also monitor trackable AI referral traffic in Google Analytics 4 (Perplexity, SearchGPT, and Bing Copilot send identifiable HTTP referrers), giving you a complete picture of AI-driven brand discovery in real numbers.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Bing Copilot each use different retrieval methods, source hierarchies, and content signals. A single-platform approach leaves most of your AI audience unaddressed.
ChatGPT draws primarily on its training corpus — the web as it was indexed during training cycles — and strongly favours Wikipedia (47.9% of top citations) and high-authority editorial domains. Getting cited by ChatGPT requires building authority on the sources it was trained on: Wikipedia entries, major editorial coverage, and verified brand mentions on established platforms. Its OAI-SearchBot crawler also performs live lookups, which recent, well-structured content can leverage.
Perplexity performs real-time retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) — pulling current web results for every query rather than relying on training data. It strongly favours Reddit (46.7% of citations), fresh content, and high-traffic editorial pages. It cites sources in 97% of responses and averages 21.9 sources per answer. Building community presence, recency, and coverage on Perplexity's preferred source types requires a fundamentally different strategy from ChatGPT optimisation.
On Perplexity, 64% of URLs never receive a single citation — and the top 6% of cited URLs capture just under half of all citations. Citation on AI platforms is winner-takes-most: brands that are present in the right sources with the right authority signals dominate, while the majority of brands are invisible entirely. GEO is about getting into that top tier before your competitors do.
Sites with a domain authority above 91 average 6 AI citations, versus just 1.6 for sites below 43. This confirms that foundational SEO authority — built through quality backlinks, technical health, and content depth — is the prerequisite for GEO success. GEO is not a shortcut around SEO; it amplifies SEO investment by making the authority you've built visible in AI-generated recommendations as well as traditional rankings.
The single most actionable on-page change for improving AI citation rates is increasing fact density — the number of specific, verifiable statistics and named data sources within your content. Research shows this produces a 41% visibility lift in AI responses. Content that makes bold claims without backing data is consistently ranked below fact-rich competitors by LLM retrieval models on every major platform.
Brands that appear consistently in AI recommendations see measurable uplift in direct branded search volume — users who encounter your brand recommended by ChatGPT or Perplexity often search for you directly afterwards. This compounding effect means early GEO investment builds a self-reinforcing visibility loop: AI recommendations drive branded searches, which strengthen overall brand signals, which improve future AI recommendations.
From measuring your starting AI Share of Voice to building the signals that move it — here is how every GEO engagement at ClickBreeze runs.
We establish your baseline by running hundreds of commercially relevant prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Bing Copilot — recording which brands are recommended, which sources are cited, and where your brand appears (or doesn't). We do the same for your main competitors to identify the Share of Voice gap we are closing.
We analyse what sources are currently being cited over you on each platform — identifying the specific editorial domains, Reddit threads, review platforms, and third-party publications that are driving competitor visibility. This tells us exactly where to focus earned media and content efforts for maximum impact on each platform.
We overhaul existing content and create new pages targeting high-intent GEO queries — increasing fact density, adding verifiable statistics with named sources, restructuring for direct answer extraction, and building comparison and alternative pages that AI systems pull from when users ask competitive recommendation queries.
We run digital PR campaigns targeting the specific publications, platforms, and community spaces that the AI systems in your sector draw from most. This includes editorial press placements, sector-specific trade coverage, review site presence, and building your brand entity signals across Wikidata, LinkedIn, and verified directory profiles.
We run your full prompt suite across all monitored AI platforms monthly — tracking citation frequency, Share of Voice versus named competitors, AI referral traffic in GA4, and branded search volume trends. Reports show the directional movement in your AI recommendation presence and the actions taken each month to drive it.
Most agencies are still figuring out GEO. ClickBreeze combines deep AI search research, digital PR capability, and cross-platform monitoring to build a genuinely measurable AI recommendation presence for UK businesses.
We build separate strategies for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot — because each platform uses different source hierarchies and retrieval methods. What works on one does not automatically work on another.
84% of AI citations come from earned media. We have the editorial relationships and digital PR infrastructure to earn coverage on the specific domains that drive AI citation — not just the generic press hits that look good in reports but don't move AI visibility.
We set up AI-specific tracking in Google Analytics 4 from the start of every engagement — capturing referral traffic from Perplexity, SearchGPT, and Bing Copilot as your AI visibility grows, so you can connect GEO investment to real traffic and leads.
GEO amplifies SEO investment — domain authority is a prerequisite for AI citations. We integrate GEO with your existing SEO programme so every piece of work builds both traditional and AI search visibility simultaneously.
Everything UK businesses ask before starting a Generative Engine Optimisation engagement — answered plainly.
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of building the content authority, earned media presence, and brand entity signals that cause large language models — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI — to cite and recommend your brand in AI-generated responses. The term was formalised in a 2023 paper by researchers at Princeton University, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI, and IIT Delhi. Unlike SEO, which positions URLs on a results page, GEO positions your brand inside the AI-generated answer itself — before the user ever sees a link. With ChatGPT processing over 2 billion queries daily, AI-generated brand discovery is now a primary channel for high-intent commercial queries.
Traditional SEO focuses on ranking URLs on search engine results pages so users click through to your website. AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) focuses on winning Google AI Overviews and featured snippets within Google's search ecosystem. GEO operates at a broader level across multiple AI platforms — focusing on building the brand authority, content reputation, and third-party presence that causes AI systems to recommend your brand when users ask open-ended questions like "Which digital marketing agency should I use in Scotland?" or "What are the best tools for ecommerce SEO?" GEO is about the overall signal landscape your brand projects across the web, not just individual page optimisation.
ChatGPT and Perplexity use different approaches. ChatGPT draws primarily on its training data — content indexed from across the web — strongly favouring Wikipedia (47.9% of top citations) and authoritative editorial sources, supplemented by live browsing via its OAI-SearchBot crawler. Perplexity performs live retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), pulling current web results in real time and strongly favouring Reddit (46.7% of citations) and high-traffic fresh content. Both reward high fact density, domain authority, earned media presence, and verified entity signals. Research shows adding statistics to content produces a 41% visibility lift in AI responses, and 84% of AI citations come from earned media placements.
Research shows only 11% of domains are cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity — meaning 89% of brands with AI visibility on one platform are invisible on the other. This is because the platforms use different retrieval methods, different source hierarchies, and weight different types of content. ChatGPT is trained on a historical corpus and favours established editorial sources. Perplexity performs real-time retrieval and favours live, fresh content on community platforms. A GEO strategy that only targets one platform leaves the majority of AI-generated brand discovery on the table.
Research consistently identifies high fact density — the inclusion of specific statistics, named data sources, and verifiable figures — as the strongest on-page predictor of AI citation, producing a 41% visibility lift. Direct answers in the opening paragraph (44.2% of ChatGPT citations come from the first 30% of a page) outperform content that buries conclusions. Third-party earned media accounts for 84% of AI citations, making external brand presence more influential than on-site content. Sites with domain authority above 91 average 6 citations versus 1.6 for those below 43 — confirming that foundational SEO authority is the prerequisite for GEO success.
GEO timelines depend on your starting authority and the platforms you're targeting. For Perplexity, which uses live retrieval, content and earned media improvements can generate citation uplifts within 4 to 8 weeks. For ChatGPT, which relies on training data and crawl updates, changes take longer — typically 3 to 6 months for meaningful Share of Voice movement. Building brand entity signals (Wikipedia, Wikidata, consistent NAP across directories) is a longer-term investment showing measurable impact over 6 to 12 months. We track AI Share of Voice monthly across all target platforms to report directional progress throughout.
UK GEO services typically start at £800 to £2,000 per month for entry-level programmes suited to local or small businesses. Foundation-level GEO for growing SMEs runs £2,000 to £5,000 per month, covering Share of Voice auditing, content optimisation, and earned media coordination. Competitive B2B and multi-market programmes cost £5,000 to £10,000 per month. Enterprise GEO for large brands managing multiple markets and platforms starts at £10,000 per month. Most engagements also include a one-off onboarding audit of £1,500 to £5,000. Industry guidance suggests budgeting 15 to 25% of your total SEO investment for GEO as AI recommendation presence becomes an increasingly critical brand channel.
We measure GEO success through a combination of AI Share of Voice metrics and downstream brand indicators: brand mention frequency across target prompts on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Bing Copilot (running hundreds of commercially relevant queries monthly); AI referral traffic in Google Analytics 4, as Perplexity, SearchGPT, and Bing Copilot send trackable HTTP referrers; branded search volume growth in Google Search Console; and Share of Voice relative to named competitors in AI responses. We also monitor earned media coverage growth and review site citation increases as leading indicators of AI visibility improvement before it fully compounds in recommendation frequency.
Tell us your main commercial queries and key competitors. We'll run an AI Share of Voice audit — testing your target prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude — and show you exactly where your brand stands today.