Questions

What is a GEO consultant?

A definition of the role, what it measures, what it fixes, and how it differs from the SEO consultant a business may already have. Written by Joe Ashta, who works in the role for law firms.

A GEO consultant works on how a business appears inside AI-generated answers. GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization, so a GEO consultant measures whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google's AI surfaces name and recommend the business, then fixes what keeps it out. The reporting units are mentions and citations rather than positions and clicks.

What the role measures

Measurement comes first, because absence has to be established before it can be explained. A GEO consultant finds out which businesses the platforms name for the questions a buyer actually asks, and whether yours is among them. Two units carry the report: the mention rate, the share of answers in which the business is named, and the count of citations, the source links a platform displays beside an answer. A citation proves the platform read the site. A mention is what the buyer reads.

What the role fixes

Four things usually keep a business out of AI answers, and a GEO consultant works on all four.

Entity clarity. The name, the address, the people and the services stated the same way everywhere, so the platforms resolve them to one business.
Structured data. Machine-readable markup that agrees with the visible page and with the profiles the business holds elsewhere.
Content worth citing. Pages that answer the buyer's question with something specific enough to quote.
Third-party corroboration. Records the business does not own, saying the same thing about it as its own site does.

How it differs from an SEO consultant

An SEO consultant optimizes a page for a position in a ranked list, and reports rankings and traffic. A GEO consultant optimizes an entity for a place inside a written answer, and reports the share of answers that name it. The two overlap, because the pages an AI system reads are largely the pages that already rank, so the SEO work still counts. What changes is the thing being optimized and the thing being counted. Generative Engine Optimization covers the discipline in full.

Why the role is also written AEO

AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, names the same job from the outcome end: being featured as the answer, and named as a recommendation a buyer acts on. Practitioners lean on AEO and academic writing leans on GEO. The two are correlated, and AEO is the more specific of them. That is why the role is written GEO / AEO consultant in Joe Ashta's entity record.

Who does this

Joe Ashta is a GEO consultant, and law firms are the market he serves. The GEO consultant for law firms page states that version of the role, including what to ask any consultant before hiring one.

What does a GEO consultant do for law firms? takes the role down to the work on a single firm. Is GEO different from SEO? sets the two disciplines side by side.