Generative Engine Optimization

Generative Engine Optimization services that make AI recommend you

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews answer your buyers' questions before they ever see a search result. We make sure the answer is you.

DeviLabs · GEO agency based in the Netherlands, serving Europe and the Baltics.

No cost, no commitment

Free AI Visibility Audit

Book a free 30-minute audit call. Before the call, we check where your brand shows up — and where it doesn't — across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews for your category's key questions. On the call, you get the findings and the exact gaps to fix. No pitch, no obligation — you keep the findings either way.

  • A prompt set built around your category's real buying questions
  • Where your brand is named, and where a competitor is named instead
  • What the engines currently get right — and wrong — about who you are
  • The specific entity, schema and content gaps blocking citations
  • A prioritised list of what we'd fix first, whether or not you work with us

30 minutes · No obligation · You keep the findings

The shift

Ranking on Google is no longer enough

For twenty years the goal was simple: rank, get the click, convert the visitor. That chain is breaking. A growing share of searches now end inside the results page or inside a chat window — the user reads a synthesised answer and never visits a website at all.

What changed
Then

Your ranking earned the click.

They land on your site
Now

The AI answer ends the search.

They land on your site
Independent research confirms it
SparkToroSearch behaviour research

Has tracked the rise of zero-click searches for years — the growing share of queries that end without a visit to any website.

SimilarwebWeb traffic analytics

Independent research corroborating the same trend across the wider search landscape.

Pew Research CenterIndependent think tank

Found that users shown an AI summary click through to source links markedly less often than users who aren't.

What it means

Being the number one organic result does not mean an AI engine will cite you.

Google's own AI Overviews sit above the organic results on an expanding set of queries. These systems select and summarise sources by their own logic — how clearly your entity is defined, how extractable your content is, how often you're corroborated elsewhere. Plenty of top-ranking pages are invisible inside AI answers.

What it costs you
01 Lost sessions

The answer replaces the click

When an AI Overview or chat answer resolves the question, the click that used to reach your site never happens. Your impression still counts. Your session doesn't.

02 Lost citations

Rankings and citations are different games

Classic ranking factors get you into the candidate set. Whether an engine actually names your brand in its answer depends on entity clarity, structured data, and third-party corroboration.

03 Lost consideration

Your competitor becomes the default answer

Ask any AI engine who the best providers in your category are and you'll get a short list. If you're not on it, you're not in the consideration set — and the buyer never knew you existed.

Definition

What is Generative Engine Optimization?

The short answer

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a brand visible, trusted and citable inside AI-generated answers — the responses produced by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews. Where SEO optimises for a ranked list of links, GEO optimises for being named, quoted and recommended in the answer itself.

In practice that means making your brand unambiguous as an entity, structuring your content so a language model can extract and attribute it cleanly, and building the third-party corroboration that gives an engine confidence to recommend you by name.

GEO builds on SEO foundations rather than replacing them. AI engines still lean heavily on crawled, indexed web content — if a page can't be crawled, rendered or understood, it can't be cited either. Technical health, clean information architecture, and genuinely useful content remain prerequisites. GEO adds the layer above: entity definition, structured data, citation-ready formatting, conversational query coverage, and off-site authority.

That's why we don't sell GEO and SEO as two engagements. At DeviLabs they are one service, because separating them produces exactly the gap most brands are stuck in — solid rankings, invisible in AI answers.

The work

What's included in GEO at DeviLabs

Seven workstreams. Every engagement starts with the audit; the rest is scoped to what the audit finds.

AI Visibility Audit

Every engagement starts here

We build a prompt set that mirrors how your buyers actually ask, run it across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and record where you appear, where your competitors appear instead, and what each engine currently believes about your brand. That baseline is what everything else is measured against.

Entity & Schema Optimization

AI engines reason about entities, not keywords. We make it unambiguous what your brand is, what it does, who it serves and where — through a consistent entity description across the site, a connected JSON-LD graph (Organization, Service, Person, FAQ, Breadcrumb), and corroborating identifiers that tie your profiles together.

Citation-Ready Content

Content built to be extracted and attributed: direct answers up front, question-shaped headings, definitions and comparison tables, dated and sourced claims. The formatting differences sound small. They decide whether a model can lift a clean, quotable passage from your page or skips to one it can.

Conversational Query Research

People type differently into a chat window than into a search box — longer, in full sentences, often comparative ("which of these is better for a small team?"). We map the conversational and buying-intent questions in your category, then make sure your site answers them explicitly rather than by implication.

Authority & Citation Building

Models weight what they can corroborate. A claim that appears only on your own domain is weak; the same claim confirmed in directories, industry roundups, comparison listicles, communities and press is trusted. We identify the sources that actually feed your category's answers and work to get you accurately represented in them.

llms.txt + Technical GEO Setup

The technical layer: a maintained llms.txt, correct crawler access for AI user agents, clean canonicals and sitemaps, render-free content delivery, and fast, stable pages. Unglamorous work that quietly determines whether your content is available to be cited at all.

Ongoing AI Visibility Tracking & Reporting

We re-run the same prompt set on a fixed cadence and report the movement: citation share per engine, which answers name you, which name a competitor, and how AI-referred traffic and branded search are trending. Same prompts, same engines, same method — so the numbers are comparable over time.

Why DeviLabs

GEO that converts, not just gets cited

Getting mentioned in an AI answer is a means, not the goal. The buyer still has to land on your site, believe what they see, and act. That second half is where most visibility work quietly fails — traffic arrives, nothing happens, and the reporting still looks great.

Half one

AI visibility brings the buyer

Entity clarity, structured data, citation-ready content and third-party corroboration make you one of the brands ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews name and link. The buyer arrives pre-qualified and high-intent.

Half two

Performance creative converts them

Years of performance creative for DTC and ecommerce brands — ad creative, video, landing-page assets — work judged on whether it moved a number, not whether it looked good in a deck. That discipline turns the visit into a customer.

DeviLabs came to GEO from the conversion side. One partner for both halves: the visibility that brings the buyer, and the creative that converts them.

Proof

See the performance creative behind the conversion half

View our work
Questions

GEO — frequently asked questions

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It's the practice of making a brand visible, trusted and citable inside AI-generated answers — the responses produced by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews. Where SEO optimises for a ranked list of links, GEO optimises for being named, quoted and recommended in the answer itself. It's also called answer engine optimization (AEO), AI search optimization or LLM SEO. Note that GEO here means generative engine optimization, not geographic or geo-targeting.

SEO aims to rank a page in a list of blue links so a user clicks it. GEO aims to get your brand named and cited inside a generated answer, where there may be no list and often no click at all. The success metric differs: SEO is measured in rankings, impressions and sessions; GEO is measured in citation share across AI engines, how often you're named versus a competitor, and AI-referred traffic.

The tactics overlap but aren't identical. SEO leans on keyword targeting, link acquisition and technical health. GEO leans on entity clarity, structured data, extractable content formatting, conversational query coverage and third-party corroboration.

Yes. GEO builds on SEO foundations rather than replacing them. AI engines still draw heavily on crawled and indexed web content, so if a page can't be crawled, rendered or understood, it can't be cited either. Technical health, clean site architecture and genuinely useful content remain prerequisites.

We treat them as one service for exactly this reason. Splitting them is what produces the gap most brands are stuck in: decent rankings, invisible in AI answers.

Months, and it compounds. Some technical and schema fixes register within weeks — an engine picking up a corrected entity description, for example. But meaningful movement in citation share generally takes three to six months, because it depends on content being crawled and re-crawled, third-party corroboration accumulating, and model providers refreshing their retrieval sources.

Anyone promising you a fixed timeline to a fixed AI citation position is guessing. AI answers are also genuinely volatile: the same prompt can return different sources week to week, which is why we measure with a fixed prompt set on a fixed cadence rather than reacting to one-off screenshots.

We build a fixed prompt set — typically 30 to 50 buying-intent questions from your category — and run it across each target engine on a set cadence. For every run we record whether your brand is named, whether it's named first or in passing, whether your domain is linked as a source, and which competitors appear instead.

Alongside that we track AI-referred sessions by referrer, and branded search impressions and clicks in Search Console. Same prompts, same engines, same method every time, so the numbers are comparable. We publish the methodology with the numbers — a citation-share figure without a stated prompt set and date range doesn't mean anything.

Primarily ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini and Google AI Overviews, with Claude and Microsoft Copilot covered where they matter to your audience. The underlying work is largely shared — entity clarity, structured data and citation-ready content help across all of them — but retrieval behaviour differs by engine, so we report per engine rather than as a single blended score.

Yes, though the shape of the work differs. For DTC and ecommerce, buyers ask AI engines for product and brand recommendations, so the emphasis falls on product entity data, category content, review and comparison corroboration. For SaaS and B2B, the questions are more comparative and solution-led ("best tool for X"), so category positioning, comparison content and directory presence carry more weight.

What doesn't change: if your category has buyers asking AI engines what to choose, there is a citation set, and you're either in it or you aren't.

A prompt set built around your category's real buying questions, run across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. You get a short report covering where your brand is named and where a competitor is named instead, what the engines currently get right and wrong about who you are, the specific entity, schema and content gaps blocking citations, and a prioritised list of what we'd fix first.

No cost and no commitment — the fix list is yours whether or not you work with us. It runs as a free 30-minute call: book your audit call here.

Find out what AI says about you

It takes one call to find out whether the engines your buyers use know who you are.

Book my free AI visibility audit