What is GEO? A Hong Kong guide to generative engine optimisation

In short

• GEO (generative engine optimisation) is the work of making your content easy for AI tools to find, trust and quote, so your brand is named when people ask them for advice or a recommendation.
• The research behind the term found that adding quotations, statistics and cited sources raised a page's visibility in AI answers by 30–40%, while keyword stuffing did little.
• For a Hong Kong brand, the starting points are practical: let the AI crawlers in, keep your company facts consistent, and publish clear answers in both English and Traditional Chinese.

What GEO means

When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews a question, they get one written answer instead of ten blue links. The tool reads a handful of web pages, writes a summary and sometimes cites its sources. GEO is about being one of those sources, and about the answer describing your business accurately.

The term comes from a 2023 research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, by researchers including Pranjal Aggarwal and Karthik Narasimhan, later presented at KDD 2024. The authors built a benchmark of real questions across many subjects and measured how often, and how prominently, a website appeared in AI-written answers before and after its content was changed.

What the research found

Three findings matter most for a business website:

1. Evidence beats repetition. Adding relevant quotations, statistics and citations to credible sources improved visibility by 30–40% on the paper's main measure. Making the text more fluent and readable added 15–30%.
2. Keyword stuffing does not work. Repeating search phrases, an old SEO habit, offered little or no improvement in AI answers.
3. Smaller sites can gain the most. In one test, a website ranked fifth in normal search results gained 115% in visibility after citing its sources, while the top-ranked site lost ground. AI tools judge the content in front of them, not only a site's reputation.

The authors also found that results vary by subject, so there is no single trick that works everywhere. A law firm, a restaurant group and a software company each need content that answers the questions their own customers ask.

What the AI platforms themselves say

The companies running these tools have published how they read the web:

• Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special markup, AI text file or schema to add. A page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in normal Search. Its advice for AI search is to publish unique, satisfying content rather than commodity text, and to keep pages fast, clean and easy to read on any device.
• OpenAI uses a crawler called OAI-SearchBot to find pages for ChatGPT search, and recommends allowing it in your robots.txt. It is separate from GPTBot, which collects material for model training, so a site can allow one and block the other.
• Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot so your site can appear in its answers, and says that crawler is not used for training.

In other words, GEO is not a secret code. It is good SEO, plus content that an AI tool can quote with confidence.

Why it matters in Hong Kong

Customers in Hong Kong search in English and in Chinese, often switching between the two in the same week. An AI tool can only recommend you in Chinese if it has found clear Chinese content about you, and the same goes for English. Many local company websites have a full English site and a thin Chinese one, or the reverse, and the gaps show up in AI answers.

Facts also need to agree everywhere. If your address, phone number, opening year or list of services differ between your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directory listings, an AI tool may leave you out or describe you wrongly. Read more in our AI marketing and GEO service.

Where to start: five steps

1. Check crawler access. Make sure your robots.txt does not block Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot. Ask your web team; it is a five-minute check.
2. Make your company facts consistent. Name, address, phone, founding year and services should match across your site and your main listings.
3. Answer real questions. Write pages that answer what customers actually ask, such as "how much does it cost", "how long does it take" and "which option suits me", in both languages, with a short answer first and detail after.
4. Show your evidence. Add specific numbers, named examples, client results you are allowed to share, and links to credible sources. This is what the research found AI tools reward.
5. Measure what AI says about you. Each month, ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google the questions your customers ask, and note whether you are mentioned and how.

You can see how we work through these steps in How we work, or contact us for an AI-visibility check of your own brand.

The short version

GEO is not a replacement for SEO, and it is not a trick. It is the habit of publishing clear, well-evidenced answers, in the languages your customers use, on a site that AI tools are allowed to read. Brands that start now give the AI tools more reasons to name them.