What is GEO — and why every brand marketer needs to pay attention right now

Here's a question your current analytics stack cannot answer:

When a potential customer opens ChatGPT and types "best [your category] brand in India" — does your brand get mentioned?

Not "does your website rank on Google." Not "what's your DA." Does your brand get recommended by AI when someone asks for a product recommendation?

If you don't know the answer, you have a visibility problem you don't know you have yet.

What is GEO?

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization — the emerging practice of understanding and improving how a brand appears in AI-generated answers across tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews.

It's the answer to a question traditional SEO was never designed to handle: what does AI say about your brand when your customer asks it for advice?

Traditional SEO optimises your website to rank in search engine results pages. GEO optimises your brand's presence in conversational AI responses — which have no results page, no position 1–10, and no click-through rate to measure.

The game is fundamentally different.

Why this is happening now

Consumer behaviour around search is fracturing. For the first time in two decades, Google's share of the "where do I go when I have a question" market is genuinely under pressure.

Some numbers worth sitting with:

• ChatGPT crossed 100 million daily active users and is being used for product research
• Perplexity is growing rapidly among high-intent, research-oriented buyers
• Google itself has rolled out AI Overviews — AI-generated summaries that appear above the traditional blue links for hundreds of millions of queries
• Gemini is now integrated into Google Search in India's mobile interface

A meaningful and growing percentage of product discovery is now happening inside these tools. Not at the edges — in the mainstream purchase journey.

When someone asks "which luggage brand should I buy for frequent travel in India" — that query doesn't produce ten blue links anymore. It produces a paragraph that names three or four brands and explains why. If your brand isn't in that paragraph, you don't exist for that buyer.

How GEO is different from SEO

The easiest way to understand GEO is to compare it directly to what you already know.

The critical difference: in SEO, you compete for page rank. In GEO, you compete to be mentioned.

An AI chatbot doesn't send users a list of ten websites. It names two or three brands, explains why it's recommending them, and moves on. The difference between being mentioned and not being mentioned is binary — you either exist in that answer or you don't.

What GEO actually measures

A proper GEO audit runs a bank of non-branded, shopping-intent queries across multiple AI platforms and measures:

Mention Rate — Out of all queries run, what percentage of responses include your brand? This is the headline metric. 70% mention rate means AI mentions you in 7 out of 10 relevant conversations.

Average Position — When you are mentioned, where in the response do you appear? First recommendation carries significantly more weight than fifth.

Sentiment — Is the AI describing your brand positively, neutrally, or negatively? How a brand is framed matters as much as whether it's mentioned.

Framing Tags — What specific attributes does AI associate with your brand? "Design-forward", "durable", "overpriced", "good for frequent travellers" — these are the mental models AI has built about your brand from the content it's consumed.

Share of Voice — Across all brand mentions in your category, what percentage belong to you vs competitors?

Platform Variance — Your mention rate on Gemini vs Perplexity vs ChatGPT vs Claude can vary wildly. Understanding why tells you exactly what kind of content to create.

The non-branded query rule

One of the most important principles in GEO measurement — and one most people get wrong — is this: all measurement queries must be strictly non-branded.

If you ask "Is Mokobara a good luggage brand?" — Mokobara will always appear. That's not a measurement, that's a tautology. Real GEO measurement asks questions a consumer who doesn't yet have a brand in mind would ask: "What are the best luggage brands for frequent travel in India?" or "Which D2C travel brand is worth buying from in 2025?"

Branded queries produce false signal. Non-branded queries reveal where you actually stand in the competitive conversation.

Why platform variance matters more than overall score

Here's where it gets interesting — and where most of the strategic insight lives.

Different AI platforms are trained on, and draw from, fundamentally different content sources. This means a brand can have wildly different visibility profiles across platforms depending on what kind of content it has published.

From our India D2C Travel benchmark, Eume has the most striking example: 72% mention rate on Perplexity, 0% on Gemini. A 72-point divergence between two major platforms.

What explains it? Perplexity's citation model rewards feature-rich, specification-heavy content — product reviews, spec comparisons, detailed feature breakdowns. Eume's content lives in tech and gadget publications that Perplexity indexes heavily. Gemini draws from editorial and lifestyle content — mainstream travel publications, GQ, Condé Nast Traveller — where Eume has no presence yet.

Each platform has its own content diet. Understanding what feeds each one is the core of a GEO content strategy.

The five AI platforms that matter (and what feeds them)

ChatGPT draws from broad training data — wide internet coverage, general editorial. Brands with a large internet footprint perform well here regardless of editorial quality.

Gemini rewards editorial and lifestyle content from mainstream publications. If GQ India, Mint Lounge, or Condé Nast Traveller has covered your brand, Gemini knows about you.

Perplexity is citation-first and real-time indexed. It rewards detailed spec content, comparison tables, and product review aggregators. High-intent, research-oriented buyers.

Claude weights authoritative, long-form sources. A single well-researched review on a high-DA publication can move Claude coverage significantly.

Google AI Overviews is the closest to traditional SEO — it correlates heavily with organic search rankings. Strong SEO infrastructure pays GEO dividends here.

The brands winning across all five are producing different types of content for each content ecosystem. The brands losing on three out of five are typically treating content as a single channel.

What to do about it

Three things, in priority order:

1. Measure first. You cannot optimise what you haven't measured. Run a proper audit using non-branded queries across at least 4 platforms. Understand your mention rate, your platform gaps, and how AI currently frames your brand. Without a baseline, everything else is guesswork.

2. Audit the platform gaps. Which platforms are you underperforming on relative to competitors? Each gap points to a specific content type you're missing. Low Perplexity score → need more specification-rich, feature-forward content. Low Gemini score → need editorial publication coverage. Low Claude score → need long-form authoritative reviews.

3. Create content that AI can cite. This is the GEO equivalent of link-building. AI platforms cite specific, authoritative, factual content. Answer questions directly. Use structured formats. Include specific claims with evidence. Write definitively. Hedged, brand-generic content doesn't get cited — specific, useful, well-sourced content does.

The compounding advantage

Here's the reason this matters urgently rather than eventually: GEO visibility, like SEO authority, compounds over time.

The brands that establish strong GEO visibility in 2025 and 2026 will be harder to displace as AI models continue training on existing web content. The brands that ignore it will find themselves watching competitors get recommended by AI while their marketing budgets keep funding channels with diminishing returns.

It's not that traditional SEO stops mattering. It's that GEO is a new layer of brand visibility that operates by different rules — and right now, most brands don't even know their score.

Cited runs GEO audits for Indian D2C brands — measuring mention rates, position, and share of voice across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. Request a free audit →