GEO is deciding who shows up in AI search now, not just Google rank.

Generative engine optimisation, GEO, is the discipline of getting a business cited as a source inside AI-generated answers, on tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Google’s own AI Overviews, rather than just ranking for a search term. It is a different fight from traditional SEO, and in 2026 the two have started pulling apart.

Why this matters now

For years, ranking well in Google was treated as the whole game. That assumption no longer holds. Fewer than 10 per cent of the sources cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot for a given query actually rank in Google’s own top 10 results for that same query. Separately, 28.3 per cent of ChatGPT’s most-cited pages carry zero organic visibility in Google at all. A business can be doing everything right by classic SEO standards and still be invisible to the growing share of people who ask an AI the question instead of typing it into a search box.

That share is growing fast. The US market for GEO services is forecast at USD 365.4 million in 2026, growing at close to 43 per cent a year, which says plenty about how quickly businesses are waking up to the gap.

GEO is mostly positioning, not code

The instinct is to treat this as a technical SEO problem: fix the metadata, add schema markup, tidy the sitemap. That is part of it, but a small part. Industry analysis puts GEO at roughly 80 per cent strategic work, brand positioning and reputation across the wider web, and only 20 per cent technical fixes. An AI answer engine is drawing on citations and cross-references from across the internet, not just crawling one site closely. Being cited well means being genuinely useful and referenced elsewhere, not just correctly tagged.

What actually earns a citation

The pattern in what AI engines choose to cite keeps coming back to the same thing: an answer that gets to the point early instead of building up to it, and a fact nobody else has already said in the same words. A page repeating what ten other sites already say has nothing to be cited for. A page with a real number attached to it, one nobody else is quoting, does.

Writing for that means putting the direct answer first and the real data early, the same discipline as writing for a person who wants the point without the run-up. GEO puts real authority where a machine can read it. If the expertise is not there to begin with, no amount of formatting invents it.

Where this leaves a business working out its own visibility

Most businesses, including a lot of the agencies advising them, are still working this out in real time. The market is barely a year old in its current form. Showing up well in Google is no longer the finish line, and a business optimising for one search surface only is chasing a shrinking share of how people actually find answers now.

Worth holding the other half of this at the same time, because the Australian data cuts against the loudest version of the story. IAB Australia and Pureprofile surveyed 1,079 Australian online shoppers in July 2026. Six in ten use AI tools at least sometimes when shopping, rising to 75 per cent among 18 to 39 year olds. But of those who do, 78 per cent read the AI summary for a quick answer and then click through to a website for the detail, and 74 per cent treat AI as one source among several rather than the only one. Eight in ten hold some concern about using it at all, led by accuracy and trust.

So the honest position is narrower than either camp wants it to be. AI answers are now a real layer between a person and a business, and most Australians are still arriving at the website afterwards. The work is making sure the answer they get in between is drawn from you, and that what they find when they land holds up. On how many Australians are in that layer and which tools they use, the two national counts published on the same day put the total somewhere between 13.6 and 17.4 million, and ChatGPT first on every method.