What is GEO?
GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is the set of actions that make a business easy for an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity to find, understand and cite. SEO aims for a place in a list of results; GEO aims for a mention in a written answer.
More and more of your customers put their questions to an assistant: “who can rebuild my website in Geneva?”, “how much does a brochure website cost?”. The assistant answers in a few lines and names two or three businesses, with links. Whether you appear can be prepared, and measured. GEO does not replace SEO: both feed on the same pages, and we do not sell them separately (see our page on AI search optimisation).
How does an assistant choose its sources?
For a local question, the assistant does not answer from memory: it runs searches on the web, reads a few pages, then writes its answer and cites its sources. A page that no search engine knows is almost never cited.
ChatGPT relies on partner search engines and on its own robot, Gemini and Google’s AI overviews on Google’s index, Perplexity on its own index. Three consequences:
- Indexing first. Being known to Google and Bing, on fast, clear pages, is the starting point.
- The page that answers wins. A price, an area or a lead time written in one sentence is picked up; “contact us for a quote” is not.
- The assistant cross-checks. It compares your website, your Google profile and the directories. Comparison sites and directories, such as Sortlist, La Fabrique du Net, local.ch or search.ch, are among the most cited sources for questions about providers in Geneva.
What can you do to be cited?
Six actions, all of them verifiable: be indexed, answer in one sentence, keep a single identity, be listed where the assistant looks, publish content worth citing, and open the door to the robots.
- Be indexed. Check that your pages appear in Google and in Bing. Without that, nothing else helps.
- Answer directly. Each page answers in one sentence the question people really ask: how much, where, when, how long.
- Keep a single identity. The same name, address, telephone number and description on your website, your Google profile and your directories, so that you are not confused with a namesake. Our guide to the Google profile details the checks.
- Be in the lists. Your listings in the directories and comparison sites of your trade, complete and accurate.
- Publish something worth citing. A case study, a guide, a table of sourced figures: precise, dated content, with its method.
- Open the door to the robots. A robots.txt file that welcomes the assistants’ search robots, an llms.txt file that summarises the business, and structured data. We publish them; we do not claim they are enough.
How do you measure whether an assistant cites you?
With a panel: always the same questions, put to several assistants, with the answers and sources kept, and a measurement repeated over time. A single screenshot proves nothing.
An assistant never gives the same answer twice, so you need a method that makes the readings comparable. Our panel’s method comes down to four rules:
- Fixed questions. A list of customer questions, written once and never reworded: your trade and your municipality, your prices, your speciality, your name. In our case, they are about building a website for a business in Geneva.
- Several assistants. The same questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and others, because each consults its own sources and does not cite the same pages.
- Answers and sources kept. We keep the full text and the links cited, not just a yes or a no. That is what tells you which page was picked up, and which competitor was named in your place.
- A repeated measurement. The same questions, to the same assistants, from the same place, at regular intervals. Only repetition shows whether a trend is real.
You can do this yourself: ten to fifteen questions in a spreadsheet, and for each reading the date, the assistant, the location, whether you were mentioned and the sources cited. In our plans, the measurement is part of the service: with Visibilité, what the assistants say about you goes into your monthly report; with Croissance, five assistants are asked five of your customers’ questions every month.
What does this measurement show at TAO Labs?
From 28 to 30 October 2026, across 15 customer questions put to ChatGPT every day from Geneva, taolabs.ch is the most cited domain in the 45 answers, yet our name moves from one day to the next.
- The most cited domain. taolabs.ch appears in 16 answers, on 9 of the 15 questions, only one of which carries our name. Next come lafabriquedunet.ch, with 15 answers, and ksadigital.ch, with 8.
- A study as the first link. For “how much does it cost to create a brochure website in Geneva in 2026?”, ChatGPT’s first link on 30 October was our study of the prices of 105 providers: sourced figures, a method, a table. Content that brings data is cited more readily than a presentation page.
- An answer that changes. ChatGPT named us in 6 answers on 28 October, 4 on 29 October and 2 on 30 October, on the same 15 questions. Without a repeated measurement, we would have concluded a rise or a fall depending on the day of the reading.
Recorded with the SE Ranking tool, AI results tracking, location “Geneva”, 28 to 30 October 2026. Three days and a single assistant: these are observations, not a law.
What can nobody promise?
Neither a place, nor a mention, nor a timescale. Each assistant decides alone, and its answer varies from one day to the next.
Nor can you pay to be cited: we sell neither advertising nor a guaranteed place, and we do not buy links. What can be worked on is the pages the assistant finds and how clear they are. And what can be judged is a repeated measurement, month after month.
What does TAO Labs do for GEO?
The basics (robots.txt, llms.txt, structured data, direct answers) are included from the Essentiel plan; monthly tracking comes with Visibilité and Croissance, which adds two pieces of content a month in each language.
See AI search optimisation, local SEO for a shop, the Croissance plan for a service business, and the plans, line by line.
Sources
- TAO Labs measurements: 15 questions, ChatGPT, location “Geneva”, 28 to 30 October 2026, recorded with SE Ranking (AI results tracking).
- TAO Labs study of the prices of 105 web providers, October 2026.
- TAO Labs page on AI search optimisation, with the detail of the same measurements.