Definition
Optimizing content so AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) cite or recommend it when someone asks a question. The AI-era counterpart to SEO: instead of competing for a click on a results page, you are competing to be the source the model quotes in its answer.
What it looks like in practice
A roofer notices that people now ask an AI assistant things like 'how long does a hail claim take in Denver' before they ask anyone for a bid. So he builds a page that answers exactly that, in the shape a model can lift: the question as the heading, a two-sentence direct answer underneath, then the steps with typical timelines, the documents an adjuster asks for, and what a homeowner should photograph first. He adds FAQ schema, dates the page, and names the neighborhoods he works in. When an assistant summarizes hail-claim timelines for a local homeowner, his page is one of the sources it pulls from.
Why it matters
GEO matters because a growing share of customers ask an assistant for a recommendation instead of scrolling a results page, and an assistant returns one answer rather than ten links. What makes a page quotable is different from what makes it rank: a clear question-and-answer structure, specifics a model can extract without guessing, schema markup, consistent facts about your business across the web, and mentions in sources models trust. The uncomfortable part is measurement. There is no reliable rank tracker for answer engines yet, and models can still get your details wrong. The practical defense is making the correct version easy to find and repeated in more than one place.