What is Generative Engine Optimisation and does your NZ business need it?
Most NZ small businesses know about SEO. Get your website ranking on Google, show up when people search for what you do. That logic still holds. But something has changed in how people find businesses, and it’s worth understanding.
A growing number of people don’t search Google anymore — or they use it differently. They ask a question directly to ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overview and get a single answer back. Not a list of ten websites to choose from. One answer. One recommendation. Sometimes a name, sometimes a business, sometimes a service provider.
If your business isn’t in that answer, you don’t exist for that person.
That’s the problem Generative Engine Optimisation — GEO — addresses.
What GEO actually is
GEO is the practice of structuring your website so that AI systems can read, understand and cite it.
Traditional SEO is built around how Google’s algorithm ranks pages. GEO is built around how AI systems decide which businesses to mention when someone asks a question. Those are related but different problems, and they require different approaches.
When an AI answers a question, it draws from websites it has crawled and can confidently interpret. It looks for businesses that clearly state what they do, where they operate, and who they serve. It looks for pages that contain direct answers to questions — not just marketing copy. It looks for signals that confirm a business is real, local and relevant.
Most websites weren’t built with any of that in mind. Not because anyone made a mistake — GEO is new. But it means most businesses are invisible to AI search by default.
How it differs from SEO
SEO gets you found when someone searches a keyword. GEO gets you cited when an AI answers a question.
With SEO, the user still makes the choice — they see a list of results and decide where to click. With AI search, the algorithm makes the choice before the user even sees your name. Being on page two of Google is bad. Not being mentioned at all by an AI system means the decision happened without you.
The other difference is how the work is done. SEO focuses heavily on keywords, backlinks and page authority. GEO focuses on clarity, structure and machine-readable signals — making it as easy as possible for an AI to understand what your business is and why it’s relevant to a specific question.
What it involves in practice
GEO isn’t one single thing. For most NZ small businesses, it involves three areas.
First, making sure your website contains explicit, clear information about your business — what you do, where you operate, who you work with. Not implied. Stated directly, in language a machine can parse.
Second, structuring your pages so they contain actual answers to questions your customers ask. AI systems quote pages that are built to be quoted. A page that describes your services in general terms is harder for an AI to cite than a page that answers “what does a WordPress care plan include?” directly.
Third, technical signals that tell AI crawlers how to read your site — what your business is, what category it fits into, what geography it serves.
Does every NZ business need this right now?
That depends on how much of your customer base is starting to use AI search to find services like yours. For most industries, that number is still small — but it’s growing, and the businesses that set themselves up now aren’t competing against much.
In most NZ service categories, AI search visibility is effectively unclaimed territory. That won’t stay true indefinitely.
If you want to know where your business currently stands, the simplest test is free: open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask “who offers [your service] in [your town]?” What comes back tells you whether you have a gap to close.
More on what GEO involves for NZ small businesses: dearjohn.nz/geo
Marjan Crabtree runs Dear John, a Paraparaumu-based business technology company helping NZ small businesses with workflow automation and AI search visibility (GEO). dearjohn.nz
