How to Choose a Mobile App Development Company in San Jose
A practical buyer's checklist for San Jose businesses hiring an app development partner: questions to ask, red flags, pricing…
Generative Engine Optimisation: How to Get Your Business Cited by AI Search
AI answers in search engines and chat assistants are changing how buyers find suppliers. A practical guide to being visible, accurate and cited.
More buyers now start research by asking an AI assistant or reading an AI-generated summary at the top of search results. Instead of ten blue links, they get one synthesised answer — and a handful of cited sources. Being one of those sources is the new SEO battleground, often called generative engine optimisation (GEO).
How AI answers choose sources
AI search systems retrieve pages they consider relevant and trustworthy, then summarise them. They favour content that is:
- Clear and specific — direct answers to real questions
- Well structured — headings, lists, tables and FAQs that are easy to extract
- Credible — consistent facts, named authors or organisations, up-to-date information
- Crawlable — fast, server-rendered HTML that bots can read without running heavy JavaScript
Practical steps
- Answer the questions buyers actually ask. "How much does a telemedicine app cost?", "How long does an ERP migration take?" Put the answer in the first paragraph, then explain.
- Use structured data. Organisation, Service, FAQ, Article and Breadcrumb schema help machines understand who you are and what a page covers.
- Publish original specifics. Ranges, timelines, checklists and comparisons are more citable than generic marketing copy.
- Keep facts consistent everywhere. Your services, locations, contact details and descriptions should match across your site, directories and profiles.
- Make every page fast and server-rendered. Many AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript fully.
- Show freshness. Date your articles and update them when things change.
- Build genuine authority. Being mentioned by reputable industry publications, associations and partners still matters.
What not to do
- Keyword-stuffed pages written for algorithms rather than people
- Thin, near-duplicate pages with nothing new to say
- Blocking reputable AI crawlers without understanding the trade-off — you may disappear from their answers
Measuring GEO
It is still harder to measure than classic SEO. Useful signals include referral traffic from AI assistants, brand mentions in AI answers for your key questions (check them manually each month), and branded search volume.
The good news
The fundamentals of GEO are the fundamentals of good content: helpful, specific, well-structured and trustworthy. If you are rebuilding your website, our CMS and website development team builds fast, server-rendered sites with structured data from day one.
