SEO vs GEO: how to get your business named by ChatGPT and Gemini in 2026

The short answer

Search engine optimisation, SEO, is the work of getting your pages to rank in a list of results. Generative engine optimisation, GEO, is the work of getting your business named inside the answer an AI assistant writes. When somebody asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews for the best tiler in Douala, there is no page two. The assistant names two or three businesses, and the rest do not exist for that customer.

The good news for a small business in Cameroon is that the two overlap heavily. Most of what makes an assistant name you is what makes Google rank you, plus one extra discipline: making sure the facts about your business are clear and consistent everywhere they appear. Almost nobody in this market is doing that deliberately yet.

How AI assistants decide what to say

Each assistant works a little differently, but the pattern is similar. For a question about a local service, most of them search the web, read a handful of sources, and write an answer that names a few businesses, often with links to where the information came from.

Two consequences follow. First, an assistant can only name you if the sources it reads mention you. Second, it tends to trust what several sources agree on. A business described the same way on its website, its Google profile and three directories is far easier to name confidently than one described three different ways.

SEO and GEO compared

Our SEO guide for Cameroon covers the foundations in full. This post is about the extra layer.

What the research says actually works

The term GEO comes from a 2023 research paper by a team from Princeton University and partners, later presented at the KDD 2024 conference. The researchers tested ways of rewriting web content to see which ones made generative engines quote it more. Their headline finding was that the best methods improved visibility in AI answers by up to about 40 percent.

Two cautions. This was a controlled experiment, not a guarantee of how any particular assistant behaves today, and the authors found the effect varied by subject. But the direction is consistent with everything else we see: assistants favour content that is specific, factual and verifiable, and they ignore the tricks that once worked on search engines.

Step 1: get the SEO foundations right

Google is explicit that there are no extra requirements and no special optimisations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A page has to be indexed and eligible to show a normal snippet. Google also says you do not need new AI text files or special markup for this. So the first GEO task is simply good SEO:

• Every important page indexed, with nothing blocked by mistake
• Fast and usable on a phone
• One page per service, each answering its search plainly
• A complete Google Business Profile with steady reviews
• Structured data that matches what the page visibly says

If those are not in place, fix them before anything else. Our ranking checklist is the order we work in.

Step 2: let the right crawlers in

Assistants can only use pages their crawlers are allowed to read. Your robots.txt file controls that, and the different crawlers do different jobs, so the choice is not all or nothing.

For most small businesses the sensible default is to allow them all, because being quotable is the point. Our own robots.txt welcomes the AI crawlers for exactly that reason. If you have a specific reason to keep content out of model training, block the training crawlers and leave the search ones open.

Step 3: be a clearly defined business

An assistant has to be sure which business it is talking about before it will name it. That is harder than it sounds when your name is spelled three ways, your address differs between Google and Facebook, and two of your phone numbers no longer work.

Then describe yourself for machines as well as people. Organisation or LocalBusiness structured data on your site, with links to your official profiles, tells every system exactly who you are. It must match what the page visibly says.

Step 4: write pages an assistant can quote

Assistants lift sentences. The easier your page is to quote accurately, the more likely it is to be used. In practice that means answering the question in the first two sentences, then giving the detail.

• Use question-shaped headings that match how people ask
• Put prices, timescales and quantities on the page
• Add a short FAQ with direct answers
• Use tables for comparisons; they are easy to lift accurately
• Cite your sources, as the research suggests
• Write in the language your customers ask in, including French

Step 5: get mentioned somewhere other than your own site

An assistant that finds you only on your own website has one source to go on. One that finds you on your site, your Google profile, two directories, a news article and a partner’s page has corroboration. That is the GEO version of authority, and for a local business it comes from ordinary places.

• Accurate listings on the directories people here actually use
• Suppliers, partners and clients who list the businesses they work with
• Trade associations and professional bodies
• Local news coverage of something genuinely newsworthy
• Reviews that describe your service in customers’ own words

Reviews matter twice: for the map results and for AI answers. Our post on getting more Google reviews covers doing it within the rules.

Step 6: measure it honestly

There is no Search Console for ChatGPT. The reliable way to measure GEO is to ask the questions your customers ask, the same way, every month, and record what happens.

Answers vary from one try to the next, so judge the trend over several months rather than one screenshot. And keep watching the numbers that pay the bills: enquiries, and where they say they found you.

What not to do

• Do not stuff keywords. The GEO study found it made visibility slightly worse
• Do not mass-produce AI pages for every town and service. Google treats pages made mainly to manipulate rankings as spam
• Do not buy fake reviews or mentions. They break Google’s policies and are easy for systems to discount
• Do not chase a special AI file before the basics. Google says none is needed for its AI features
• Do not block the search crawlers you want to be found by

A 90-day GEO plan

We will not promise that any assistant will name you by a certain date, because nobody controls what they say. What reliably improves your chances is being the clearest, most consistent, best-corroborated answer to the question.

What it costs to have it done

GEO is part of our search work rather than a separate trick, and it is included in our Market Dominance SEO plan at 450,000 FCFA a month. Every engagement starts with the free SEO and AI visibility audit, which shows what the assistants say about you today. Our GEO service page explains the work in detail, and SEO pricing lists every plan.

Go further: the SEO guide, our SEO and GEO service, SEO prices, or local SEO and Google Business Profile.

Questions people ask