Generative engine optimization (GEO) services
Generative engine optimization for how AI describes your business.
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is work aimed at how AI tools describe a business when they write an answer, not only whether one of its pages appears. Hudson South's GEO work makes your services, service area, expertise and proof specific and consistent on your own site, so tools that read the web have accurate material to draw from. We cannot control what any AI model says, and we don't claim to.
Fair warning: GEO is one of several labels agencies use for overlapping work, and the label matters less than what actually changes on your site. Below is where the term came from, what GEO adds to answer-first content, how LLM SEO fits in, how we check what AI tools say about you, and how the work is bought.
The term
A research label that became a sales label.
The phrase comes from a 2023 research paper, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization," by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues, posted to arXiv in November 2023.
The authors proposed GEO as a way for content creators to improve how visible their content is inside AI-generated responses, and they reported gains of up to 40 percent in their own test environment. That figure describes an experiment on a research benchmark. It is not a forecast for any particular business, and anyone quoting it as one is overselling. The research itself is a fair starting point; the trouble starts when a benchmark result shows up in a sales deck as a promise.
Agency marketing now uses GEO alongside AEO and AI SEO, and the same label can describe very different services from one provider to the next. The labels overlap so much that the useful question is what a provider actually changes. Our plain explanation of AEO and its sibling terms covers the vocabulary; this page covers the work.
What GEO adds
Answers cover the question. GEO covers the whole description.
Answer engine optimization asks whether your site answers what buyers ask. GEO asks a broader question: when an AI tool summarizes your business, does it have the right facts, and do they agree with each other? Our answer engine optimization service builds the answers; the GEO layer makes sure the business behind them is described correctly.
One clear statement of who you are
Your services, who you serve, where you work and what you do not do, stated plainly in one place and repeated in the same words elsewhere. Being mentioned is not the same as being described correctly, and inconsistent descriptions across your own pages can give a tool conflicting material to choose from.
Proof a summary can carry
Specific, checkable evidence: credentials, process details, warranties, the kinds of situations you handle. A two-sentence summary has room for a specific fact, not for a paragraph of praise.
Fit and comparison pages
Pages that say who your service suits, who it does not, and how your approach differs from the usual alternatives. When a buyer asks an AI tool to compare options, a business that has never written down its own comparison can leave that answer to whoever has.
Consistency beyond the website
Your Google Business Profile and other listings should say what your site says, in the same words. Google Business Profile posts are part of our monthly plans, so the posts on your profile use the same descriptions as the pages behind them.
LLM SEO
LLM SEO: training data and live retrieval are two different doors.
LLM SEO usually means trying to influence what large language models say. The AI companies' own crawler documentation separates two activities that the term blurs together.
The first is training: collecting web content that may be used to build future models. The second is retrieval: reading current pages so a tool can answer a question today and, often, link to its sources. OpenAI documents separate crawlers for the two. Google offers a Google-Extended token that it says does not affect Google Search, and Perplexity says its search crawler is not used to train foundation models.
| Control | Company | What the company says it is for |
|---|---|---|
| GPTBot | OpenAI | Crawling content that may be used in training its generative AI foundation models |
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | Surfacing websites in ChatGPT's search features; sites opted out are not shown in ChatGPT search answers |
| Google-Extended | Whether content may be used to train future Gemini models and for grounding in Gemini Apps; Google says it does not affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search | |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | Surfacing and linking websites in Perplexity search results; Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models |
You can't edit what a model already learned. You can edit what's on your site today.
That is the practical consequence. No business can edit what a model has already learned, and any provider promising to place your business inside a model's training data is promising something none of these companies' documentation offers. What a business can influence is the current content that retrieval tools read, which is where our work goes. OpenAI states that each of its settings is independent, so a site can allow OAI-SearchBot to appear in search results while disallowing GPTBot. Whether to block training crawlers is a business decision for you, and it is a separate decision from search visibility.
The four steps, applied to GEO
The description has to come from the business itself.
GEO runs on the same four steps as all of our work. The Authority Asset step records the facts and expertise that define your business, because inventing what the business knows is not the writer's job, and a description pieced together from old pages and guesses is how errors spread. Hudson Twenty-One keeps the language in your voice across every page, so the same service is not described three different ways.
Market Intelligence then shows how competitors describe themselves and where the market's descriptions blur together, which tells us what has to be said more precisely. AEO Creation publishes it: the services page, the fit and comparison pages, the proof, each structured so a machine can tell what it is reading. Skip that work, and the tools keep working from whatever your oldest page says.
Checking the result
Ask the tools what they say about you, on a schedule.
The check starts with your own team. Put this to them: if a buyer asked ChatGPT what we do and who we serve, would we agree with the answer? If nobody knows, that is the first thing to find out.
Monthly plans include a visibility report on a defined question set run across AI platforms, with competitor comparison on larger plans. Whoever does the checking, include descriptive questions in the set, such as what the business offers and where it works, alongside the buyer questions.
Consider a fictional bookkeeping firm in Greensboro that dropped payroll services three years ago. AI answers keep listing payroll among its services because three places still say so. An old page. A directory listing. A blog post nobody remembers writing. The fix is not a clever prompt. It is a current services page that says plainly what the firm does and does not offer, a corrected listing, and the old page updated, followed by the same descriptive questions rerun in the next report. Firms like this one are the kind of business our work for financial and accounting firms is built around.
Ways to buy it
Part of every AI search content engagement, not an add-on.
GEO is built into our AI search content projects and retainers rather than sold separately. A 30 to 60 day project starts at $9,500 as a fixed fee; monthly plans start at $1,500 a month, run month to month, and include the visibility report. Market exclusivity comes with most monthly plans: one business per trade per market, with the market defined around where you actually serve, and your proposal names the trade and the area.
If the bigger problem is that search engines and AI crawlers cannot reliably reach your site at all, start with the AI SEO foundation instead. A perfectly consistent description on a site the crawlers can't reach still goes unread.
Questions
Questions about generative engine optimization
Is GEO different from AEO?
They overlap. AEO focuses on answering the specific questions buyers ask; GEO focuses on how AI tools describe the business as a whole. We treat them as two sides of the same work, and both run inside the same engagement.
Can you get our business into ChatGPT's training data?
No, and be wary of anyone who says they can. OpenAI documents GPTBot as the crawler for training data and OAI-SearchBot as the crawler for ChatGPT's search features. Our work targets the current pages that search and retrieval tools read.
Should we block AI crawlers?
That is your decision, and the documentation lets you make it in parts. OpenAI says its settings are independent, Google says Google-Extended does not affect Google Search inclusion or ranking, and Perplexity says PerplexityBot is not used for foundation model training. Blocking a training crawler and blocking a search crawler have different effects, and Google-Extended also covers grounding in Gemini Apps, not only training.
How long before AI tools describe us correctly?
It depends on how often each tool rereads your pages and how widespread the old information is, and no one controls that schedule. What we control is publishing correct, consistent pages and checking the descriptive questions in every report.
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