Generative Engine Optimisation: Getting Cited by ChatGPT and Gemini

Google’s stranglehold on search traffic is cracking. ChatGPT has 200 million weekly active users. Gemini is baked into Android. When someone asks an AI model a question, they’re no longer clicking through to a search results page-they’re getting a cited answer, sometimes with a link, sometimes not.

This is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), and it’s not a future problem. It’s happening now. The question isn’t whether your business should appear in AI answers. It’s whether you’ll be ready when your competitors realise this is where the traffic conversation needs to start.

Why Traditional SEO Isn’t Enough Anymore

SEO optimised your site for algorithms that rank pages. GEO optimises your content so language models choose to cite you in their responses. They’re not the same thing.

A page can rank on Google’s first result for “best accounting software for startups” and still never get cited by ChatGPT. Why? Because ChatGPT wasn’t trained to prioritise Google rankings. It was trained on text patterns, factual accuracy, and source credibility. An AI model cares that you’re authoritative, specific, and trustworthy-not that you’ve got killer meta descriptions.

Here’s the practical difference:

• SEO – optimise for discoverability and click-through. Keywords, backlinks, Core Web Vitals matter.
• GEO – optimise for citation and mention. Accuracy, original research, clear attribution, and topical authority matter more.

A fintech we worked with was ranking well for “invoice financing.” Their traffic was steady. But when we analysed what ChatGPT actually cited for invoice financing questions, it wasn’t them. It was their competitors’ pages with clearer definitions, real case studies, and transparent pricing tables. The ranking didn’t translate to AI recommendations.

How AI Models Decide Who to Cite

Language models don’t crawl the web in real-time like Google. They work from training data-a snapshot of the internet frozen at a point in time. OpenAI’s GPT-4 was trained on data up to April 2023. Gemini’s knowledge cuts off at different points depending on the version. This means:

1. Your very newest content won’t be cited immediately, even if it’s brilliant.
2. Your domain authority and publication history matter-models recognise established sources.
3. Citations favour pages with clear, fact-checkable information. Data-heavy pages. Tables. Lists.
4. Original research and proprietary data get cited more often than rehashed content.

When a model answers a question, it’s pattern-matching across sources it was trained on. If your article appears frequently in training data alongside correct answers, the model learns to associate your domain with reliable information. If it appears alongside incorrect or vague information, it deprioritises you.

This also means that niche expertise punches above its weight. If you’re the only Australian source discussing “SaaS compliance for ASX-listed companies,” and you’re factually correct, models will cite you heavily in that domain-even if your domain authority is lower than a general business blog.

The Structural Elements That Get You Cited

Content structure matters far more for GEO than traditional SEO. AI models prefer to cite sources that present information clearly and factually.

Build pages around these elements:

• Definition sections – clear opening paragraph that defines your topic in plain language. Models cite these directly.
• Data tables – comparison tables, pricing breakdowns, statistics. Models extract and cite these frequently.
• Numbered lists – step-by-step processes, frameworks, checklists. Much more citable than prose.
• Original research – surveys, benchmarks, proprietary data unique to your business. This is gold. Models cite original data sources heavily.
• Author byline and credentials – models check who wrote the piece. If you’re a domain expert, say so. Cite your credentials.

A SaaS metrics page we built recently included a comparison table of AUD costs across five Australian hosting providers, updated quarterly with real data from customer invoices. It wasn’t indexed on Google’s first page for “Australian SaaS hosting costs”-but it got cited in ChatGPT responses to that question within two months because it was the only Australian source with current, trustworthy data.

The Two-Track Strategy: GEO + SEO

You’re not replacing SEO with GEO. You’re building both simultaneously, and they reinforce each other.

SEO still drives traffic – roughly 60-70% of web traffic in Australia still comes from Google search. That’s not dying overnight.

GEO drives credibility and mentions – being cited by ChatGPT doesn’t directly generate clicks. But it builds brand visibility, establishes you as a source, and creates inbound link opportunities when people click through from AI responses or share citations with colleagues.

The smarter play is to build content that serves both:

1. Write for search intent (what users are typing into Google), but structure for citation (clear definitions, tables, original data).
2. Build topical clusters around your niche expertise. Models recognise thematic coherence across a domain.
3. Publish original research or data regularly. This gets cited by other publishers, which feeds back into both SEO and GEO.
4. Get external coverage from reputable publications. If The Australian Financial Review writes about your company or research, that signals credibility to models.
5. Ensure your website metadata is clean and your author information is accurate. Models check source credibility before citing.

For Australian founders building software or SaaS, this is particularly important. The number of credible Australian sources in most software categories is small. If you publish high-quality, original content, you’re competing for citations against much larger, less-localised competitors-and you can win on specificity and accuracy.

What To Avoid

Some of the SEO tactics that still work won’t help you with GEO, and a few actively hurt you:

• Keyword stuffing and thin content – models penalise this harder than Google does. They’re trained to recognise when content is padding rather than informative.
• Affiliate content without disclosure – if your page is obviously a recommendation engine for commission, models deprioritise it.
• Unattributed data or statistics – cite your sources. Models check citations. If you claim a statistic without backing it up, you lose credibility.
• Outdated information presented as current – this is worse for GEO than SEO because models have been trained to spot temporal inconsistencies.

Getting Started Now

You don’t need to rebuild your entire content strategy tomorrow. Start here:

1. Pick your top 10 business-relevant search queries in your industry.
2. Search those queries in ChatGPT and Gemini. See what sources get cited.
3. Audit your own pages on those topics. Are they structured for citations? (Tables, definitions, original data?)
4. Create or update 2-3 pages with high-citation-potential structure first. Don’t wait for perfection.
5. If you have proprietary data or research, publish it. This is your competitive advantage.

If you’re building a new product or platform and thinking about how content and growth should work together from day one, talk to Amora about your build. This isn’t something you should figure out mid-launch.

The businesses that win in the next two years won’t be the ones optimising hardest for Google. They’ll be the ones appearing in AI answers because they publish better, clearer, more trustworthy information. That’s a competitive advantage worth building for.