What is GEO (@whatisgeo)

In depth: What is GEO: a plain-English guide to how AI answers pick their sources

Written from What is GEO's own profile data — claims, answers and testimonials — in a measured human voice via ScriptGrain · last written 2026-10-02

Ask ChatGPT a question about your industry and something quietly disappears: the ten blue links. What's left is a single answer, stitched together from sources you can't see and can't control. That gap, between "we used to know how visibility worked" and "we genuinely don't", is the reason What is GEO exists.

What is GEO is a website, whatisgeo.app, and nothing more complicated than that. One page. No login, no pricing tier, no upsell lurking behind the free content. It's an educational guide to Generative Engine Optimisation, built for business owners and marketers who don't have a technical team on staff and never will. Published by Adapt Progress Evolve, a UK software studio, and reachable at hello@whatisgeo.app if anyone wants to ask a question directly.

The problem it's trying to solve

The trouble with GEO as a term: everyone's using it, and almost nobody agrees what it means. What is GEO's answer is specific. Generative Engine Optimisation is the practice of improving how visible and how accurately represented a website is inside answers generated by AI systems, ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, and so on. It doesn't replace SEO. It sits on top of it, and it shifts the odds of getting mentioned or cited without ever guaranteeing either outcome.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. The guide is blunt about it: no legitimate practice can promise placement inside someone else's generated answer. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. What is GEO, notably, is not selling anything.

What's actually in the guide

The single page walks through how GEO relates to SEO and to AEO (answer engine optimisation, the older cousin), then breaks a search-backed AI answer into four stages: query, discover, select, answer. It's a simple framework, and that's the point. A business owner reading it on a lunch break needs to understand where their content might get filtered out, not sit through a lecture on transformer architecture.

From there it moves into six principles, a section on crawler access and the llms.txt proposal, a worked example showing the framework applied to a real scenario, a 30-day starter plan, and a method for measuring progress using a fixed set of prompts run repeatedly over time. No budget assumed. No agency assumed. Just a business owner, a laptop, and thirty days.

Where the claims come from

What is GEO labels every single recommendation. Is it a platform requirement, something a crawler or API genuinely demands? Is it a research finding, something a study measured? Or is it practical advice, an educated guess based on how these systems seem to behave? The guide doesn't blur those categories, which is rarer than it should be in this space.

The sourcing backs that up. Google Search Central's own AI-features guidance gets cited. So does Aggarwal et al.'s 2024 GEO paper from KDD (the one on arXiv, 2311.09735, that more or less kicked off academic interest in this whole field). OpenAI's and Perplexity's crawler documentation feature too, alongside the llms.txt proposal itself. Nothing here is invented or inferred without a citation attached.

Built to be read by the thing it's describing

There's a neat bit of self-consistency running through the project. A guide about being legible to AI systems is, itself, fully legible to AI systems. The whole thing is served as Markdown, as plain text, and indexed through an llms.txt file, so an AI crawler doesn't have to scrape a styled webpage to understand what's on it. All public crawlers are allowed by robots.txt. No gatekeeping, no paywall, no "sign up to keep reading."

It's a small detail, but it's the kind of detail that tells you whether an organisation believes its own advice. What is GEO practises the discovery and access principles it's teaching, on the same page it's teaching them. That's not a marketing flourish. It's just consistency, applied quietly, to a guide that never once asks you to buy anything.