Adjacent discipline
SEO
Gets your pages ranked in search results. Still matters; different game.
Category primer
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
The discipline of structuring product information so AI assistants can interpret it, trust it, and recommend it. If SEO was about ranking in a list of links, GEO is about being the answer.
This animation compares three disciplines: SEO ranks pages in search results, AEO extracts facts into answer boxes, and GEO gets products named and cited inside AI-generated recommendations.
The shift
The naming moment is the new front door of ecommerce.
Search engines rank pages; the shopper clicks and decides. AI assistants generate answers; the shortlist is decided before any click happens. When someone asks “what's the best protein powder for marathon training?”, the assistant names two or three products. That naming moment is the new front door of ecommerce — and most product catalogues were never structured for it.
SEO vs AEO vs GEO
Three disciplines, three targets.
Adjacent discipline
AEO
Gets facts extracted into answer boxes.
Where Geoffy works
GEO
Gets your products included and cited in AI-generated answers and recommendations: the consideration set plus the citation. It's the union of being in the shortlist and being the referenced source.
The overlap is real: much of GEO is built on disciplines SEO people already know — structured data, crawlability, content quality. The difference is what you're optimising for: a ranked list versus a synthesised answer.
Reference Engineering
The practice, not a tactic.
Reference Engineering is Geoffy's practice within GEO: engineering the canonical product page so an AI engine can read it, trust it, and cite it. Concretely, that means one structured widget on the product page carrying answer-ready content across the full range of buyer intent, a structured-data layer that mirrors the visible page exactly, and controls that keep the two coherent as the catalogue changes. Underneath it all, one discipline: only verified, distinctive, comparable claims — because those are the statements AI engines can check, trust and repeat.
What it explicitly is not: separate “AI pages”, hidden content for bots, or attribute-stuffing. The industry tried the parallel-page pattern; it doesn't hold, for the same reason doorway pages didn't hold in search.
The two layers
AI engines meet your products twice.
Upstream, structured data feeds the knowledge systems engines build their world model from — slow-moving, compounding over weeks and months.
At retrieval, when a user asks a question and the engine fetches your page in real time, it reads the visible content. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity don't execute your JavaScript at that moment, so anything that only appears after client-side rendering isn't there as far as they're concerned. And when Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages adding JSON-LD in May 2026, AI citations moved by a statistically insignificant margin — schema alone is not the unlock at the moment of answer.
Do only schema and you're invisible at the moment of answer. Do only visible content and you never enter the world model properly. GEO is doing both — and keeping them in agreement.
This animation shows the two layers engines meet a product through: structured data feeding the upstream knowledge systems, and the visible page read at retrieval time — both required, and required to agree.
Intent Tiers
Broad, Mid and Ultra — blocks inside one widget.
Customers ask at different depths: Broad (“I'm looking for a coat”), Mid (“a waterproof, warm coat”), Ultra (“Gore-Tex, fur-lined, for the Himalayas, under £300”). Coverage across all three — as blocks inside one widget on the product page — is how a product stays in the answer whichever way the question is phrased.
This animation shows the three depths of buyer intent — Broad, Mid and Ultra — as blocks inside one widget on the product page, not as separate pages.
FAQ
GEO questions
The questions teams ask before they start.
Is GEO replacing SEO? +
No. Different surfaces, different mechanics. Your SEO keeps working; GEO covers the surface SEO can't see.
Do GEO pages replace my product pages? +
No — that's the point. The widget lives on your product page. No parallel site.
Does GEO involve hidden content? +
Not here. Everything Geoffy ships is visible on the page and mirrored in the structured data. Hidden bot-content is both against platform policies and, more practically, ignored at retrieval.
Which platforms? +
Live today on Shopify and WordPress / WooCommerce. Magento is on the roadmap; BigCommerce and Adobe Commerce are planned.
How do I know if I have a GEO problem? +
Ask an AI assistant to recommend products in your category. If you're not in the answer, you have a GEO problem. Or run the free GEO Score and see it measured.
Next step
See the mechanism, or measure yourself against it.
Read how the engines actually choose, or run your free GEO Score and see where you stand today.
Turn your catalogue into AI-readable discovery pages and structured outputs.
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Structured outputs enabled
First-party pages published
Discovery coverage expanding