Insights/July 1, 2026 · 12 min
What Is Generative Engine Optimization?
Ian, founder
GEO is the work of being cited, recommended, or accurately described when people ask AI tools who to call.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your business easy for AI-assisted search to understand and recommend. It is not a separate product from SEO. It is SEO under a new retrieval layer: answers assembled from entities, reviews, and pages rather than ten blue links.
What the machines are actually using
When someone asks an AI tool for a family dentist in Toronto, a local attorney, or an HVAC company in a specific town, the system draws on the same public record Google already has: your site, your listing, directories, reviews, and other pages that mention you. If those sources agree — name, location, services, reputation — you are easier to include. If they conflict, you are easier to skip.
A results page can show ten dentists. An answer can mention two. The ones mentioned are easy to identify: a real location, a clear specialty, recent reviews, a site that confirms the same facts. Two names, a P.O. box, or a thin listing falls out of the shortlist.
What optimizing actually means
One trading name. One primary address. Phone and hours that match the door, the site, and the Google Business Profile. Each service you want to be known for gets a page that states the service, who it is for, the city, and the next step. FAQs use the questions people actually ask — new patients, evening hours, parking — because those sentences are what an answer can cite.
Reviews should name the work. 'Emergency crown on Thursday' is useful. 'Great job' is not. Ask after the visit. Reply. Recency matters.
What it does not mean
It does not mean ranking number one in ChatGPT. Nobody reputable can sell that. It does not mean a new vendor for 'AI SEO,' or stuffing pages so a model will quote you. It does not replace local SEO. It raises the cost of sloppy local SEO.
Measure what you can: branded search, listing views, calls and forms. Spot-check how assistants describe your category in your city a few times a year. Ignore tools that sell ChatGPT rank tracking.
How Comino treats it
AI search visibility sits inside local SEO, which is month two of the 90-Day Lead Engine — after the site can convert. Same monthly cycle. Same refusal to promise a citation. The businesses that are easy to recommend are the ones whose facts are clean.
If you want this looked at for your practice, start with a free growth assessment. Not a checklist you hand to someone else.