Get your business cited when AI answers your customers' questions

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the work of structuring your website and online presence so AI tools — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews and Gemini — cite your business when they answer your customers' questions. It is not a replacement for SEO; it is a layer on top of it. We help small businesses across Peterborough, Cambridgeshire and the East Midlands appear in those answers — and we start by showing you, for free, exactly where you appear today and where you don't.

You've probably been told you "need to show up in AI search." This page explains plainly what that actually means, whether it matters for a business like yours yet, and what we do about it. No hype, no pressure — and it's written the way we build GEO pages for clients, so you can see the method on the page itself.

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What is generative engine optimisation (GEO)?

GEO structures your content so AI systems — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews and Gemini — cite your business when they generate an answer. SEO gets you into Google's list of links; GEO gets you into the AI-written answer above them. The two aren't in competition: Google's AI Overviews draw on content that's already indexed and ranking, so strong SEO is the foundation GEO builds on.

Who this is for

This is for the owner of a UK small business — e-commerce or B2B — who keeps hearing about AI search and can't get a straight answer on whether it's worth their time. You don't need to understand retrieval models or schema. You need to know: are my customers using AI to decide who to shortlist, and if so, does my business turn up?

It's most relevant if you sell professional or considered services — consultancy, B2B suppliers, anything a customer researches before they buy. It's least urgent if you're a local trade people find on a map and call straight away: AI answers barely touch those searches yet (only about 2.2% of local-service searches trigger one — SeoProfy, May 2026), so for a lot of trades the right answer today is genuinely "not yet, here's what to watch." We'll tell you which group you're in before you spend a penny.

What has actually changed

Search has quietly split into two tracks. One is the familiar list of links. The other is an AI-written answer that summarises the web and names a handful of sources — and increasingly, that answer is where the research starts.

It's worth being precise about the scale, because the real picture is calmer than the headlines. Back in February 2024, Gartner forecast that traditional search engine volume would fall 25% by 2026 as people shift to AI chatbots and other tools. That was a forecast, not a confirmed outcome — and so far the shift is partial, not a cliff edge.

What practitioners are seeing on the ground is a two-stage pattern. UK agency Innovate247 (April 2026, practitioner guidance) describes AI engines taking over the research and shortlisting stage — who's worth considering — while Google Maps and direct search still own the booking stage. Their read is that professional and consultancy categories are the most exposed to this shift, and trades the least. So for a lot of small businesses, the change isn't "AI is replacing Google." It's that the moment a customer first decides whether you're on the list has moved somewhere new.

Why it matters commercially, without the hype

The part most agencies overstate is volume: AI referral traffic is still small. It's roughly 1% of all web referrals, with ChatGPT making up about 87% of that (Conductor, reported by Search Engine Land, 2025 — US data). If anyone tells you AI is already sending floods of visitors, they're selling.

What's notable is quality, not volume. The traffic that does arrive converts unusually well:

Similarweb (May 2026 clickstream) measured ChatGPT referral conversion at 7.1% — second only to paid search at 7.8%.
Visibility Labs (94 e-commerce brands, January–December 2025) found ChatGPT traffic converted 31% higher than non-branded organic search (1.81% versus 1.39%).

Both figures are early-stage and largely measured on e-commerce, so they won't map exactly onto every sector. The fair summary is: a high-quality early signal, not a volume replacement. Someone who clicks through from an AI answer has usually already been told you're a sensible choice — they arrive warmer.

There's a consumer-behaviour signal too, though it's not UK data: BrightLocal (Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, n=1,002 US adults) found 45% of US consumers now use AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% the year before. There's no UK equivalent yet, so we won't pretend it describes your customers — we'll show you what's actually happening for your queries instead.

How AI decides what to cite

There isn't one "AI search" to optimise for. There are several engines, and they work differently — which is exactly why a single generic tactic doesn't cut it.

Google AI Overviews generate answers from content that's already indexed and ranking. Google's own documentation is unambiguous: there are no additional requirements or special optimisations to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode — a page just needs to be indexed and eligible for standard Google Search with a snippet (Google Search Central). In other words, strong SEO is the foundation here.
ChatGPT draws on its training data plus live web search. It favours encyclopedic, well-sourced content, and sources that show up consistently across several trusted platforms.
Perplexity leans hardest on recency and community-validated sources — trade press, niche directories, discussion forums.

These really are different worlds. A 680-million-citation analysis reported by AuthorityTech (March 2026) found only about 11% of domains cited by ChatGPT are also cited by Perplexity. Treat that as directional rather than precise, but the direction is clear: what earns a citation in one engine often does nothing in the other, so treating them as one channel is a mistake.

On whether you must already rank in Google to be cited: the most rigorous study we've seen is from Ahrefs (July 2025, 1.9 million citations across 1 million AI Overviews). It found 76.1% of AI Overview citations come from pages already in Google's top 10 — meaning roughly 24% come from outside it. So a strong SEO position is the dominant prerequisite, but it isn't an absolute gate. Where studies disagree on that figure, we use the most rigorous one rather than the most flattering.

One thing that definitively does not work: keyword stuffing. The peer-reviewed GEO study from Princeton and IIT Delhi (KDD 2024) found it produced no benefit for AI citation. Cramming keywords is a tactic from an older web.

What actually influences AI citation

This part is grounded in evidence rather than opinion. The Princeton / IIT Delhi GEO study (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024) tested optimisation methods against a benchmark and found they could lift a page's visibility in AI-generated responses by up to around 40%. The strongest levers were adding well-attributed statistics, citing authoritative sources, and including expert quotations — alongside writing that's simply clear and readable.

Translated into things we actually do to a page:

A direct answer in the first 40–200 words. AI engines lift concise, self-contained answers. Bury the point and you won't be quoted.
Question-format headings. People ask AI full questions, not four-word keyword strings — so headings phrased as the question earn the match. (This page does it throughout.)
Statistics with inline attribution. A figure with a named source and a date is far more quotable than an unsupported claim.
Named expert quotations. A real, attributed voice adds the credibility AI looks for.
Citing authoritative sources within the content. Pages that reference solid sources are themselves treated as more reliable.
FAQ sections with FAQPage schema. Structured question-and-answer pairs feed cleanly into AI answers. (Schema helps here and with rich results — but note Google is explicit that schema is not a requirement for AI Overviews. It's helpful, not mandatory.)
Freshness. As a rough planning benchmark — not a precise law — Frase (citing Seer Interactive and Amsive) reports roughly half of AI-cited content is under about 13 weeks old. A quarterly refresh is a sensible cadence.

Google's own guidance points the same way: helpful, well-structured, genuinely human content is the lever — not over-engineered schema or keyword tricks.

Local AI visibility for UK businesses

If you're a local business, your Google Business Profile isn't just map optimisation any more — it feeds local AI answers too, so we treat it as part of GEO. Beyond that, the citation signals for UK local businesses are consistency and presence across the places AI trusts: review platforms like Trustpilot and Google, professional directories, specialist forums and trade press, all carrying the same name, address and phone details.

That puts reviews in a new light — and there's a legal dimension you need to get right. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came into force on 6 April 2025. It bans fake reviews and "review gating" (only inviting happy customers to leave one), and the Competition and Markets Authority can issue fines of up to 10% of global turnover (gov.uk / CMA). So genuine review acquisition is now both a GEO lever and a legal requirement — we'll never set you up any other way.

What True Noise does {#how-it-works}

Our GEO work runs in six plain steps.

AI visibility audit. We check where your business currently appears — or doesn't — across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews for your 10–15 most relevant queries, including specifically local ones like "your service Peterborough." We show you the gaps against your competitors. This is the free starting point.
Foundation fix. We make sure AI crawlers aren't accidentally locked out — a common, invisible trap. When Cloudflare moved to blocking AI crawlers by default for many sites in July 2025, a lot of businesses ended up blocking bots without realising. We check your robots.txt and crawler access (including the main AI crawlers — GPTBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot), make sure key content is server-side rendered so it's actually readable, and add an llms.txt file at your domain root. (To be clear: llms.txt is a tidy hygiene measure — proposed by Jeremy Howard in September 2024 — not a ranking or citation lever. We implement it; we don't oversell it.)
Content structure overhaul. Answer-first paragraphs, question-format headings, statistics with attribution, expert quotations, and FAQ pairs with FAQPage schema — the evidence-based levers above, applied to your key pages.
Authority signals. Consistent name, address and phone across directories; Google Business Profile optimisation; Trustpilot and trade-directory presence; prompt, genuine review responses.
Platform-specific content. Encyclopedic service guides for ChatGPT; fresh, regular content for Perplexity; solid organic SEO to reinforce Google AI Overviews. Different engines reward different things.
Monthly measurement. Share-of-voice tracking across your target queries, GA4 AI-segment reporting (with proper consent — UK GDPR and PECR apply), and a quarterly content refresh.

This is the same method we've used on this page. The most honest proof of a GEO service is whether the people selling it can earn citations for themselves, so we hold ourselves to it.

What we call "AI search optimisation" — and why we don't go head-to-head on jargon

You'll see this work labelled a few ways: GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), or "AI visibility." They describe the same goal — being the source AI quotes. As an AI search optimisation agency working with UK small businesses, our angle isn't to win a vocabulary contest; it's to do the unglamorous, evidence-led work that actually gets a small business cited — and to be local enough to check how you appear for genuinely local queries, something most national agencies won't bother with for a business your size.

What results look like

Our position rests on the evidence above — the peer-reviewed Princeton and IIT Delhi GEO study (KDD 2024), the Ahrefs AI Overview citation analysis (July 2025), the Similarweb clickstream conversion figures (May 2026), and the AI Overview click-through research from Ahrefs and Seer Interactive.

Alongside that third-party evidence, here's what we can tell you from our own work. There's a consistent pattern in the audits we run:

Most small-business sites are inadvertently blocking at least one major AI crawler.
Most have no FAQ schema at all.
Most don't appear in AI answers even for their own name plus their town.

Those are concrete, fixable problems we find again and again — and they're often the quickest wins.

Two third-party benchmarks help size the prize, each with its caveat stated up front because the caveat matters:

AI-referred visitors have been estimated at roughly 4.4x the value of traditional organic visitors (Semrush, June 2025). Important: that study covered digital-marketing and SEO topics only, not general business sectors, so treat it as suggestive, not a promise for your industry.
The conversion figures earlier (Similarweb 7.1%; Visibility Labs 31% higher) are real but early-stage and mostly e-commerce.

We won't quote you an industry "+X% in 90 days" headline as if it were our own result. It wouldn't be true, and you'd be right not to trust it.

How this connects to your SEO

GEO doesn't replace SEO — it sits on top of it. Because Google's AI Overviews generate answers from content that's already indexed and ranking, the SEO foundation we build is the prerequisite for Google AI visibility. They're the same work, pointed at a newer surface.

There's a sharper reason to care about being inside the AI answer rather than just below it. Ahrefs (February 2026, 300,000 keywords) found that when an AI Overview appears, it cuts click-through for the number-one organic result by 58% on informational queries. Ranking first matters less if a summary sits above you. The flip side is encouraging: Seer Interactive (2025) found that being cited in an AI Overview lifted a source's organic click-through rate from 0.74% to 1.02%. Being the quoted source is the position to aim for.

If you're starting from scratch on the fundamentals, our SEO service is the right first step — and the two are usually done together.

How GEO fits our pricing

GEO is part of our monthly plan rather than a separate, padded retainer. It typically sits within our Growth (£750/mo) or Scale (£990/mo) tiers as one of the things your capacity is pointed at, alongside SEO, content and the rest — with priorities agreed with you each month. Larger one-off pieces (a full content restructure, for example) can be scoped as custom project work at £60/hour. No lock-in, rolling monthly, 30 days' notice.

For context only — not our pricing — UK practitioners (Innovate247, April 2026) report bundled GEO retainers in the £1,500–£4,000/month range, with high-exposure categories putting maybe 20–30% of budget into AI visibility and the rest into local SEO and Google Business Profile. We mention it so you can see we're deliberately built to be affordable for a small business, with capacity sensibly split rather than poured into one fashionable channel.

See our pricing in full

Is now the right time?

A fair question, and the honest answer is: the window is open, but it isn't slamming shut. UK practitioners (PUSH Group, March 2026) put the UK GEO market at roughly 18 months behind the US in maturity. That's the calm version of "early-mover advantage" — there's a genuine head start to be had locally, without the panic some agencies manufacture. Move deliberately, not in a rush.

Frequently asked questions

What is GEO and how is it different from SEO?

GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) structures your content so AI systems — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini — cite it when they generate answers. SEO gets you into Google's ten blue links; GEO gets you into the AI-written answer above them. They aren't in competition: Google's AI Overviews use content that's already indexed and ranking, so strong SEO is the foundation. And keyword stuffing doesn't work for AI citation (Princeton GEO study, KDD 2024) — genuine, well-structured, well-sourced content does.

Does my business actually need this, or is it too early?

It depends on your category. Local-service trades have very low AI Overview exposure — only about 2.2% of local-service searches trigger one (SeoProfy, May 2026) — so there's no need to panic. For professional services, consultancy and B2B suppliers, the research-and-shortlisting stage is already shifting towards AI. The real question is whether your customers research via AI before they buy. The free audit answers that for your 10 key queries.

How does Google decide what appears in AI Overviews?

Google says there are no special additional requirements: a page must be indexed and eligible for standard Google Search with a snippet (Google Search Central). AI Overviews use content that already performs in standard search. So the path is solid technical SEO, genuinely helpful and well-structured content, and being indexed. You don't need AI-specific files or schema to appear — though standard structured data is still good practice for rich results.

How is ChatGPT different from Google AI Overviews for being cited?

They use different systems. Google AI Overviews draw on content already ranking and indexable, so SEO is the foundation. ChatGPT draws on its training data plus live web search, and favours encyclopedic, well-sourced content that appears consistently across several trusted platforms. Perplexity weights recency and community-validated content most heavily. Only about 11% of domains are cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity (680-million-citation analysis reported by AuthorityTech, March 2026) — so treating them as one channel is a mistake.

Will this reduce my website traffic?

It can change it. AI Overviews do cut click-through for pages below them — Ahrefs found a 58% reduction for the number-one position on informational queries when an Overview is present (February 2026, 300,000 keywords). That's exactly why appearing as a cited source inside the Overview is more valuable than ranking below it. For local-service queries, AI Overview exposure is currently low (about 2.2%, per SeoProfy, May 2026), so displacement in that segment is limited for now. The shift to address is the research stage.

What does AI-referred traffic actually convert like?

Volume is small — about 1% of total web referrals (Conductor via Search Engine Land, 2025) — but it converts well. Similarweb (May 2026) measured ChatGPT referral conversion at 7.1%, second only to paid search. Visibility Labs' study of 94 e-commerce brands found ChatGPT traffic converted 31% higher than non-branded organic (1.81% versus 1.39%). The caveats matter: most studies are e-commerce-focused and attribution is imperfect. The commercial signal is real, but the volume is still small.

What is an llms.txt file, and do I need one?

It's a plain-text/markdown file placed at your domain root that gives AI crawlers guidance about your site — proposed by Jeremy Howard in September 2024, similar in spirit to robots.txt. It's cheap to add. But it's a hygiene and guidance measure, not a citation or ranking lever, and the specification has no "must cite me" directive. We implement it as good housekeeping — and we won't pretend it's the work that earns you citations.

How long does it take to see results?

It varies by category and starting point, so we won't promise four-week miracles. UK practitioner data (Innovate247, April 2026) suggests most local small businesses see meaningful AI-engine visibility within about six months of consistent investment, and measurable influence on enquiries within 9–12 months. The technical fixes — unblocking crawlers, FAQ schema, llms.txt — take days. Content restructuring takes a few months to propagate, and Perplexity tends to respond to fresh content faster than ChatGPT. The free audit identifies the quickest wins first. (Practitioner guidance, not a guarantee.)

See exactly where you stand — for free {#free-audit}

We'll show you precisely where you appear, and where you don't, across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews for your 10 most important queries — including your local ones. You'll see the gaps against your competitors and the quickest wins. No commitment, and we deliver it within 5 working days.

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True Noise Ltd · Company No. 17162702 · Registered in England & Wales. An AI-forward digital partner for small businesses across Peterborough, Cambridgeshire and the East Midlands.