There’s a moment most business owners and marketers have had in the past year or so where they typed their company name or a relevant question into ChatGPT, and then sat there in mild horror watching the AI confidently recommend three of their competitors and say absolutely nothing about them. It stings a little. It stings a lot if you’ve spent years building up your Google presence.
Here’s the thing, though: that’s not a slight against you personally. It’s just how these systems work right now, and more importantly, it’s a problem you can actually do something about.
This is what people are starting to call GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation. It’s the practice of structuring and positioning your content so that AI tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity are more likely to surface your business when someone asks a relevant question. It sits alongside traditional SEO rather than replacing it, and if you get it right, the two disciplines reinforce each other nicely.
Why AI Search Works Differently To Google
Google’s traditional search serves up a list of links and lets you decide which one to click. AI search does something fundamentally different: it synthesises information from multiple sources and presents a single answer. You don’t get ten blue links on the search result page. You get one response, maybe with a handful of citations underneath to check out the sources of the information.
That changes the game considerably. Ranking on page one of Google used to be the goal. Now the goals are to be either the source that the AI trusts enough to draw from in the first place, or to be recommended for prompts relating to your product or service. Fundamentally, AI searches are designed to answer people’s questions without the visitor even needing to visit your website, but can still send traffic when the user needs to.
AI models like ChatGPT are trained on large bodies of text. The more clearly, authoritatively, and consistently your content answers real questions about your industry, your services, and your expertise, the more likely that content is to become part of what the AI understands to be true. And once you’re embedded in that understanding, you tend to get cited when it’s relevant.
What AI Models Actually Look For
Think of AI search engines less like a librarian looking for the best book, and more like a well-read friend who’s trying to give you a quick, accurate answer based on everything they’ve ever read. They’re drawing on content that is clear, factual, specific, and written by someone who obviously knows what they’re talking about.
That last point is doing a lot of work. Vague, hedging, generic content that could apply to anyone doesn’t get pulled into AI responses. Content that demonstrates genuine expertise, answers specific questions directly, and uses natural language that mirrors how real people ask questions tends to do much better. It’s a bit like optimising for Voice Search, which was one of the previous hot topics in SEO a few years ago.
This is where a lot of brands are getting it wrong right now. They’ve spent years optimising for keyword density and backlinks, producing content that reads like it was written for an algorithm rather than a human. AI systems, somewhat ironically, are better at detecting that hollow quality than Google ever was.
The Practical Stuff: How to Actually Optimise
Start with your authority signals. AI models weigh consistency and credibility heavily. If your business name, your spokespeople, and your core claims appear consistently across your website, your social profiles, industry directories, and third-party publications, the AI has more data points to draw on when forming its understanding of who you are. Inconsistency confuses the model. Consistency builds the picture.
Write for questions, not just keywords. People don’t type complete sentences into Google very often, but they absolutely do when talking to ChatGPT or using voice search. Your content needs to directly and clearly answer the kinds of questions your customers are asking. What does a conveyancer actually do? How long does a commercial fit-out usually take? What’s the difference between a mortgage broker and a bank? If your site answers these questions in plain language, you become a useful source. If it doesn’t, someone else certainly does.
How AI Searches differ in Australia
Be specific about geography and context. Australian AI search queries often include location and context, and the AI is trying to match the answer to the audience. This is because Australia has a very different economy, being so isolated from the rest of the Western world, where most websites are based. Our major cities are spread out so far away that they might as well be different countries, with multiple time zones, regulations and other quirks.
If you’re a Melbourne-based business, your content should clearly and repeatedly establish that. If you serve particular industries or demographics, your content should reflect that specificity.
General content loses out to specific content almost every time in these systems.
Use structured, readable formatting. Subheadings that reflect actual questions, short paragraphs, clear factual claims, and a logical flow all help AI models extract and understand your content more reliably. This isn’t about gaming the system. It’s just about writing clearly, which was always the right approach anyway.
Build your presence beyond your own website. AI models don’t just look at your website. They look at everything they can find about you: press mentions, reviews, LinkedIn profiles, podcast appearances, guest articles, and forum contributions. The more places your name and expertise show up in a credible context, the more the AI understands your authority on a topic. A strong Google My Business profile, genuine customer reviews on reputable 3rd party platforms, and media coverage all feed into this.
This is why SEOs are starting to care more about citations and brand mentions, not just good backlinks, when previously citations on big websites were just seen as a wasted opportunity if there was no backlink.
The Role of E-E-A-T (And Why It Matters More Than Ever)
Google introduced the concept of E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, as a way of evaluating content quality. It’s become even more relevant in the age of AI search, because these are roughly the same signals that AI models use to decide which sources to trust.
Practically, this means your content should be clearly attributed to a real person with demonstrable expertise. It should cite sources where appropriate, acknowledge complexity rather than oversimplifying, and be factually accurate. It should read like it was written by someone who has actually done the thing they’re writing about, not someone who asked an AI to produce 800 words on a topic they’ve never thought about before.
Author bios matter. Named experts matter. Real case studies and specific examples matter. This is the kind of content that earns trust with AI systems, and it happens to be the kind of content that earns trust with human readers too.
Schema Markup: The Shortcut AI Appreciates
If you’re not already using structured data markup on your website, you’re leaving an easy win on the table. Schema markup is essentially a way of labelling your content so that machines can understand it more precisely. It tells search engines and AI systems things like: this is an FAQ section, this is the business address, this is a review, this is a product with these specific attributes.
For AI optimisation, the FAQ schema is particularly valuable and something SEO experts flocked to over the past year or two. When your content is marked up in a way that clearly identifies questions and answers, AI systems can pull from it much more readily. The same goes for business information schema, which helps establish your location, hours, and contact details in a machine-readable format.
It’s not glamorous work, it’s not even visible to the naked eye as it’s all in the code, but it pays off.
Patience Is Part of the Strategy
One thing worth being upfront about: GEO isn’t a switch you flip. AI models are updated periodically, and the changes you make to your content today may not show up in AI responses for weeks or months. The same was true of SEO in its early days, and the same discipline that served you there applies here.
What you’re building is an authoritative, credible, well-structured content presence that AI systems recognise as trustworthy. That takes time to establish, but it’s also harder for competitors to knock down once it’s there.
The businesses that are taking this seriously now, before it becomes standard practice, are the ones who’ll be well-positioned when AI search becomes the default way most people find services and answers. Which, looking at the trajectory, isn’t going to be all that long from now.
If you want help building that kind of presence, WebOracle works with Australian businesses on exactly this kind of strategy. It’s the kind of work that tends to compound over time, and the best time to start is before you need it.