Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of making your web pages easy for AI assistants — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude and Microsoft Copilot — to read, understand and quote when they answer a question. Where traditional SEO aims for a blue link on page one, GEO aims to be the source the AI cites or paraphrases when someone asks "who does signage in Karama?" or "how much does a website cost in Dubai?"
It matters because a growing share of searches now end inside an AI answer, with no click to a results page at all. If your business is not in that answer, you are not in the conversation. The good news: the fixes are mostly ordinary good practice, and most Dubai competitors have not done them yet.
How do AI assistants actually answer a question?
They do not know about your business from memory. When someone asks a current, local or commercial question, the assistant runs a search behind the scenes, fetches a handful of pages, reads them, and writes an answer from what it found. Google AI Overviews does this on top of normal Google results. Perplexity shows its sources openly. ChatGPT search and Claude work the same way when browsing is on.
So the job is in two parts. First, your page has to be found by the search the assistant runs — that is still SEO. Second, once fetched, your page has to be the one that gives the clearest, most quotable answer. That second part is GEO.
What makes a page quotable?
AI models reward pages that answer directly. A page that opens with three paragraphs about "our passion for excellence" before saying what you do will be skipped for a page that states the answer in the first two sentences. In practice the quotable page has:
- A direct answer up front. The first paragraph under each heading answers the heading's question in 2–3 sentences, then the detail follows.
- Question-shaped headings. "How long does a website take?" beats "Our Process".
- Concrete numbers, ranges and steps. "Typically AED 8,000–25,000 in the UAE market" is quotable. "Competitive pricing" is not.
- Named facts. Location, service area, languages, hours, delivery times. Assistants love specifics they can attribute.
- Short paragraphs and lists. Models extract from lists and tables far more reliably than from dense prose.
This is exactly how we structure the pages we build under web design, and it is why every post on this blog opens with a direct answer.
Which technical signals help AI crawlers?
Four things on the technical side make a measurable difference:
- Structured data (schema.org). Mark up your organisation, local business, services, FAQs and articles in JSON-LD. FAQPage schema in particular hands the assistant ready-made question-and-answer pairs. Google uses it for AI Overviews; other engines parse it too.
- An llms.txt file. A plain-text file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt that summarises what the site is, who it is for, and links to the most important pages. It is a young convention, but it costs nothing and several crawlers already read it. We covered the details in our llms.txt and schema guide.
- Fast, clean HTML. AI fetchers usually have a tight time budget and often do not run JavaScript. If your content only appears after a script loads, the crawler sees an empty shell. Content in the HTML, under 2 seconds to load, no interstitials.
- Allowing AI crawlers in robots.txt. Check that GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and OAI-SearchBot are not blocked. Some WordPress security plugins block them by default. If you want to be quoted, you have to let them in.
Is GEO different from SEO, or the same thing?
Mostly the same foundation, with a shift in emphasis. Everything that helps classic SEO — a crawlable site, a Google Business Profile, real reviews, pages that match search intent — still matters, because the assistant's search step relies on it. Our local SEO checklist is still step one.
The differences are in writing style and in what counts as a win. SEO copy was often padded to hit a word count and stuffed with keyword variations. GEO copy is tighter, answers first, and uses the words a customer would say. And the win is not only a click: it is being named in the answer, which brings fewer visits but far better-qualified ones. Someone who arrives after an AI told them "Dasma in Karama does this" is already most of the way to buying.
What should a Dubai business do this month?
A practical order of work for a small business site:
- Rewrite the opening paragraph of your home page and each service page so it answers "what do you do, for whom, where, and roughly what does it cost?" in three sentences.
- Add an FAQ section of 4–6 real customer questions to each service page, with FAQPage schema.
- Add LocalBusiness and Organisation schema with your address, phone, hours, and service area.
- Publish an llms.txt file and check robots.txt allows the main AI crawlers.
- Test: ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google (with AI Overview) the five questions your customers actually ask. Note who gets cited. Repeat monthly.
None of this requires a new website if yours is reasonably built. If it is slow, script-heavy or impossible to edit, it may be cheaper to rebuild than to patch — see why slow sites cost leads. For businesses on our full-service marketing plan, this testing and tuning is part of the monthly routine.