What GEO is and what GEO isn’t
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. If SEO is the practice of increasing your website’s ranking on traditional search engines like Google, then GEO is the practice of increasing the *probability* of your brand being mentioned in AI-native search engines like ChatGPT.
Read that definition again, because the word “probability” is doing a lot of work there.
Traditional SEO operates in a world of positions. You rank at position one, three, or eleven, and those positions are visible, trackable, and relatively stable. GEO operates differently. There are no guaranteed positions in an AI-generated response. The model decides — based on its training data, the sources it can access, and how your brand has been written about across the web – whether you appear at all. Your goal isn’t to rank. Your goal is to be present enough, credible enough, and consistently enough mentioned across the right sources that the AI includes you when it matters.
That’s a fundamentally different strategic challenge.
The SEO world you built your strategy around is shifting
For the last two decades, the game was reasonably simple. You wanted customers to find you online, so you invested in SEO – search engine optimisation. You worked on your website’s technical health, built content, earned backlinks, and chased rankings on Google. When you ranked well, people clicked. When they clicked, some of them converted. The feedback loop was clear, measurable, and relatively predictable.
Most businesses have this model baked into their marketing infrastructure by now. It’s the foundation of digital visibility, and for a long time, it was enough.
Here’s the thing, though: “enough” has a shelf life.
Search fundamentals have changed in how people search
The complication isn’t that SEO stopped working. It still works. The complication is that a growing number of people are no longer starting their search on Google at all.
They’re opening ChatGPT and asking it which hotel to book for a business trip. They’re prompting AI Mode or Gemini to recommend a restaurant in a city they’re visiting. They’re asking AI assistants to compare service providers before they ever visit a brand’s website. And when they do this, they’re not seeing a ranked list of blue links they can scroll through and evaluate. They’re receiving a synthesised, confident answer – often with a shortlist of names.
Is your brand one of those names? More importantly, do you even know?
That’s the question most hospitality marketers haven’t seriously sat with yet. And it’s not a comfortable one, because the honest answer for most businesses is: we have no idea.
Why this matters more in hospitality than almost anywhere else
Think about the actual behaviour of a traveller planning a trip. They’re not in pure research mode the way someone buying software might be. They’re often emotionally invested, slightly overwhelmed, and looking for someone – or something – to just tell them where to go.
AI-native search is purpose-built for that moment. It synthesises. It recommends. It speaks with authority. And if your property or brand isn’t part of what it knows and trusts, you’re invisible at the exact moment someone is ready to make a decision.
This isn’t a future problem. Travellers are already searching this way. The question is whether your brand shows up when they do.
How to measure GEO performance?
Here’s where most early GEO conversations go wrong. Marketers hear about AI search visibility and immediately try to map it onto the metrics they already know: traffic, rankings, click-through rates. But GEO doesn’t produce traffic the same way SEO does. Sometimes the AI answers the question so completely that the user never clicks through to any website. Your brand gets mentioned, the recommendation influences a booking, and your analytics show nothing.
This is the core insight that I think most practitioners are missing: GEO should be treated as an insight and brand presence hub, not a traffic channel. The value is in *being part of the answer*, not in the click that follows. If you try to measure GEO purely through traffic metrics, you’ll conclude it isn’t working and you’ll be drawing the wrong conclusion.
So what do you actually do about it?
The resolution isn’t a ten-step framework — it’s a shift in how you think about your brand’s digital footprint.
GEO requires you to think seriously about how your brand is being written about across the web. Not just on your own website, but in reviews, editorial coverage, travel publications, forums, structured data, and third-party listings. AI models learn from what they can access. If the most credible, high-authority sources on the internet describe your property clearly, accurately, and consistently, that builds the kind of signal that makes you a probable recommendation.
It also requires you to stop optimising exclusively for clicks and start optimising for *authority*. That means substantive content that actually answers the questions your ideal guests are asking. It means building genuine credibility signals — the kind that an AI model would find convincing, not just the kind that satisfies a keyword density checker.
And it means accepting that some of the most valuable work you do will be hard to attribute directly. Brand visibility in AI responses is a soft signal that shows up in downstream behaviour — more direct searches, more branded traffic, higher conversion rates on people who arrive already decided. You have to be willing to connect those dots.
The businesses that will figure this out first aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones willing to ask a harder question: if a potential guest asked an AI to recommend somewhere exactly like us, would we even be in the conversation?