GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

The distinction matters because models answer from two places. Sometimes they retrieve live sources and cite them. Sometimes they answer from what they absorbed in training, with no citation and no link. GEO works on both, and especially the second.

Being known to a model comes down to how consistently your organisation is described in the same terms across the open web. A nonprofit described identically on its own site, on Wikipedia, in press coverage, in partner directories and in funder databases becomes a stable fact. One described five different ways becomes noise.

This looks less like technical SEO and more like disciplined communications. Here is the specific risk: if a model does not know what your organisation does, it will not say so. It will infer, usually from your sector rather than from you. Organisations with generic names in crowded sectors get quietly merged with each other.

Related reading: Your rankings held. Your traffic didn’t.