Shoppers now ask AI what to buy
“Best saree brand to buy online in India.” “Which D2C skincare brand is worth it?” “Compare these two jewellery labels.” Questions that used to go into Google are increasingly typed into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, and the answer names two or three brands. If yours is not among them, you never enter the consideration set.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), sometimes called AI GEO or answer engine optimisation, is the work of becoming one of the brands these systems mention.
How AI assistants decide which brands to name
No model publishes its recipe, but in practice recommendations are assembled from four things:
- What the model learned during training: brands that were widely written about before the cutoff
- What it retrieves live: pages it can crawl and cite at the moment of the question
- What other sites say about you: listicles, reviews, directories, press, forums and communities
- How clearly your own site states the facts: what you sell, who for, price range, categories, where you ship
The pattern is consistent: AI assistants repeat what the web already agrees on about you. GEO is largely the work of making that agreement exist and be easy to parse.
What we do for GEO
1. Make your brand legible as an entity
Clear, factual pages that state your category, specialisms, price positioning, locations served and what makes you different, plus consistent Organization data and matching details across your profiles.
2. Publish the formats AI answers draw on
- Comparison and “best for” pages written honestly, including who you are not right for
- Buying guides that answer the question directly in the first lines
- FAQ blocks with plain, quotable answers
- Specification and material detail that models can lift accurately
3. Build third-party presence
Your own site alone rarely convinces a model. Listings, genuine reviews, category roundups, press mentions, podcasts and community discussion are what create the consensus AI repeats.
4. Open the door to AI crawlers
We check that your robots.txt and any firewall or bot protection allow the crawlers these assistants use, publish a clear content summary file, and make sure key pages render without JavaScript where possible.
5. Measure mentions
We build a prompt set that matches how your buyers actually ask, run it across the major assistants on a schedule, and track whether you are named, how you are described, and which competitors appear alongside you.
GEO and SEO reinforce each other
Retrieval-based answers lean heavily on pages that already rank and can be crawled. A brand invisible in search is usually invisible to AI too, which is why we run GEO alongside AI SEO rather than as a separate exercise.
What is realistic, and what is not
Some honesty, because this field attracts a lot of it being skipped:
- Nobody can guarantee a mention. No agency controls what a model says, and outputs vary between users, sessions and model versions.
- Measurement is sampling, not analytics. There is no Search Console for ChatGPT. We test prompts repeatedly and report patterns, not precise share figures.
- Models disagree. You may be recommended by Perplexity and ignored by Gemini in the same week.
- Training-data effects are slow. Retrieval-based mentions can change in weeks; what a model “knows” without searching changes over much longer cycles.
- The reliable path is unglamorous: be genuinely good, be written about, and be easy to parse. Tricks aimed at models tend to age badly.
We do this on our own site
Every page and article on d2cscaleup.com is written answer-first, with FAQ structured data and clear entity information. Within weeks of launch, Search Console showed the site appearing for long conversational queries such as questions about Meta strategy for D2C fashion brands. That is the same method we apply for clients.
Who GEO suits
It works best for considered purchases where people research before buying: fashion and ethnic wear, jewellery, beauty, home decor and gifting, and for brands with something genuinely distinctive to say. It is weakest for commodity products with no story and no reviews.
Frequently asked questions
What is GEO in marketing?
Generative Engine Optimization: the practice of increasing the chance that AI assistants name, cite or recommend your brand in their answers, as distinct from ranking in a traditional list of links.
Is GEO different from SEO?
It overlaps heavily. Both need crawlable, credible, well-structured content. GEO adds emphasis on entity clarity, comparison content, third-party consensus and mention tracking instead of rank tracking.
Which AI assistants do you work on?
Mainly ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI results and Gemini, and Claude. The underlying work is largely shared across them.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend my brand?
No. Anyone who guarantees that is guessing. We can improve the conditions that make it likelier and show you measured changes over time.
How do you measure AI mentions?
With a fixed prompt set run regularly across assistants, recording whether you are mentioned, in what terms, and who else appears. It is a sample, so we report trends rather than exact percentages.
Does an llms.txt file help?
It is cheap to add and we usually do, but its real effect is still unproven. We would not build a strategy on it.
Curious whether AI assistants mention your brand today? Ask us for a free AI visibility check.