Your customers are asking AI who to buy from. Does it know you exist?

There used to be a fairly predictable way to find a business online. You Googled it.

Maybe you searched best accountant near me. Or physio in Melbourne. Or where to buy ridiculously good sourdough.

You scrolled. You clicked. You compared. That's not disappearing. But there's now another person at the table. Except they're not a person.

Meet your newest referrer: AI

People are increasingly turning to tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI-powered search experiences to help them make decisions. And they're having conversations that are not always in neat little search keywords.

“What's a good accounting software for a small Australian business?”

“Find me a cafe that works in collaboration with non-profits in Sydney.”

“Where's the best book shop near me?”

So asking yourself Where do I rank on Google? is no longer enough. There’s another question worth asking:

When someone asks AI about businesses like mine, do I show up at all?

Welcome to the slightly weird world of GEO - because apparently marketing needed another acronym!

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. In simple terms, it's about making your business and its expertise easier for AI-powered search experiences to discover, understand and potentially reference when answering someone's question.

That doesn't mean throwing everything you know about SEO into the bin. Quite the opposite.

Good SEO still matters. Your website needs to be accessible. Your content needs to answer relevant questions. And there need to be clear signals about who you are, what you do and why you're credible.

What's changing is the journey around it. Someone might discover you through Google. Someone else might ask ChatGPT for options. Another person might get an AI-generated answer directly inside Google. Same potential customer. Different route to you.

So, can you “rank” on ChatGPT? Sort of.

But we'd be careful with anyone promising to get you to “#1 on ChatGPT”. AI answers aren't a neat list of ten blue links. The answer can change depending on how a question is asked, the context around it and the information the system can find. That means GEO isn't really about chasing one magical position.

It's about building enough clarity, relevance and authority around your business that machines can make sense of you. And, conveniently, humans tend to appreciate those things too.

The internet needs to understand what you're known for. If your website says the same things as everyone else in your category, you're not giving people much reason to remember you. This is where having an actual point of view becomes surprisingly useful.

Stop creating content just because someone told you to “do SEO”

Does this mean SEO is dead? No.

We've been killing SEO off every few years and the poor thing keeps turning up to work. Search is evolving, not disappearing. The fundamentals still matter: useful content, clear website structure, authority, relevance, technical accessibility and a good experience when someone lands on your site.

GEO adds another consideration. Your content isn't only being read by people looking through search results anymore. It may also help AI-powered systems understand your business and decide whether you're relevant to the question someone is asking.

So don't think: SEO or GEO? Think: Can people, search engines and AI all understand why my business matters? Much less catchy acronym. Much better marketing question.

So, what should a small business actually do?

You don't need to redesign your entire marketing strategy because someone discovered ChatGPT. Start smaller. Search for your business and see what appears. Ask a few AI tools questions your customers might genuinely ask and see which businesses get mentioned.

Look at your website and ask whether a stranger could quickly understand what you're known for. Then look at what you're putting out into the world. Are you answering real questions? Whether someone discovers you through Google, ChatGPT, Gemini or whatever arrives next, one thing hasn't changed: Being worth finding comes before being found.

And that's where we'd start.