If you've been paying attention to how people search for things lately, you'll have noticed something shifting. More and more of your potential customers aren't scrolling through a page of Google results anymore. They're asking ChatGPT a question, or getting an AI-generated answer at the top of Google before they even see a list of links. And if your business isn't showing up in those AI answers, you've got a problem that traditional SEO alone isn't going to fix.
We're Red Evolution, a B2B web design and digital marketing agency based in Aberdeen. We've been doing SEO for over 20 years, and Generative Engine Optimisation for a lot less, and we'll be the first to admit that the ground is moving under everyone's feet right now. That's why we've recently become partners with a tool called Otterly.ai, which helps us track and improve our clients' visibility in AI-generated search results. But before we get into the tool itself, let's talk about what's actually happening and why you should care.
So what is GEO, and why are people talking about it?
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. If you're familiar with SEO (search engine optimisation, the practice of getting your website to rank well on Google), then GEO is its newer cousin. Where SEO is about appearing in a list of search results, GEO is about getting your business mentioned, cited or recommended inside the AI-generated answers that tools like ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot produce.
Here's why that matters. When someone asks ChatGPT, "Who are the best accountants in Aberdeen?" or asks Perplexity ", What CRM should I use for a mid-sized engineering company?", the AI doesn't show a list of ten blue links. It gives one synthesised answer and typically cites between two and seven sources. If your business is one of those sources, brilliant. If it's not, you're invisible in a channel that's growing at an alarming rate.
Gartner estimates traditional search volume will drop by 25% by the end of 2026, as people shift towards AI chatbots and virtual agents. And the data backs it up. AI-referred web traffic jumped by over 500% between early 2024 and mid-2025. That's not a gentle trend, that's a landslide. If you've already read our guide to AI search and what it means for B2B companies, you'll know we've been watching this closely for a while now.
How is GEO different from SEO?
The honest answer is that GEO builds on top of good SEO rather than replacing it. If your website has solid, well-structured content that answers real questions, you're already in a decent position. But there are important differences in how AI engines decide what to include in their answers compared to how Google ranks traditional search results.
With traditional SEO, you're competing for position in a list. You might be result number three or result number seven, but you're still on the page, and someone might click. With AI-generated answers, there is no list. The AI picks a handful of sources to weave into a single response, and if you're not one of them, you don't exist in that conversation. It's more like being selected for a panel discussion than entering a race.
The things that help you get cited by AI engines are broadly what you'd expect from good content marketing, but with a few specific twists. AI models tend to favour content that gives direct, clear answers (especially in the first 40 to 60 words of a section), content that's rich in specific facts and figures rather than vague generalisations, content that cites credible sources, and content that uses proper structured data markup so the AI can easily parse what you're saying. If you're already following our advice on writing SEO-friendly content, you're not starting from scratch.
The problem we kept running into
Here's what was frustrating us. We could see that AI search was becoming a bigger part of the picture for our clients, but we had no reliable way to measure it. Traditional SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs are brilliant at what they do, but they track rankings in conventional search results. Unless you subscribe to their AI tracking versions, they don't tell you whether ChatGPT is recommending your client's business, or whether Google's AI Overview is citing your client's website, or what Perplexity says when someone asks about your client's industry.
We were effectively flying blind on an increasingly important channel. And if you can't measure something, you can't improve it. Although we were tempted to change our SEMRush subscription, we thought it might be a better idea not to buy a better Swiss Army knife but instead to use a tool built for the job. That's what led us to Otterly.ai.
What Otterly.ai actually does
Otterly.ai is an AI search monitoring tool built specifically for this new world of generative search. We've become partners with them because, having looked at the options out there, we think they're doing the best job of solving a genuinely difficult problem. Full disclosure on that, because we always like to be upfront about our partnerships (if you've read our HubSpot content, you'll know we take the same approach there).
Here's what Otterly.ai lets us do for our clients, and this is where it gets properly useful.
Tracking brand visibility across AI platforms
Otterly.ai monitors whether your brand and website are being mentioned or cited across all the major AI search platforms: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Mode, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot. It does this automatically and continuously, so we can see at a glance whether your visibility is growing, shrinking, or holding steady. Before we had this, we were manually typing queries into ChatGPT and hoping for the best, which is about as scientific as it sounds.
Prompt research
This is one of the features we find most valuable. Otterly.ai helps identify the specific questions and prompts that people in your market are actually putting into AI tools. That's a subtle but important difference from keyword research. With traditional keywords, you might target "B2B web design Aberdeen". With prompt research, you're looking at the full natural language questions people type into ChatGPT, things like "can you recommend a web design agency in Scotland that specialises in engineering companies?" Understanding those prompts lets us shape content that's more likely to be picked up and cited in AI answers.
GEO audits
Otterly.ai will audit your website and score individual pages against 25 or so evaluation factors that affect whether AI engines are likely to cite your content. Things like how clearly your content is structured, how authoritative it reads, and how well it answers the kinds of questions AI users are asking. It breaks this down model by model, so we can see where you're strong on ChatGPT but weak on Perplexity, for example, and work on the gaps.
Volatility tracking
This one matters more than you might think. AI-generated answers can change much more rapidly than traditional search rankings. Your page might be cited in a Google AI Overview on Monday and completely absent by Wednesday, even though your traditional ranking hasn't moved at all. Otterly.ai tracks this volatility so we can spot when something shifts and investigate why, rather than finding out weeks later that traffic from AI referrals has dropped off a cliff.
Competitor comparison
As with traditional SEO, it's useful to know how you stack up against competitors. Otterly.ai lets us run brand visibility reports that compare your AI citation share against your competitors, so we can see who's winning the AI search battle in your sector and where the opportunities are.
What this means for your business
If you're a business owner or managing director reading this and thinking "this all sounds very technical, what does it actually mean for me?", here's the plain English version.
The way your potential customers find and evaluate suppliers is changing. A significant and growing number of them are using AI tools as part of their buying process. According to one estimate, around 44% of consumers now use AI as a primary source of information when making purchasing decisions, and in B2B the figure is even higher, with something like 90% of B2B buyers using generative AI at some point in their buying journey.
If your competitors are showing up in those AI-generated answers and you're not, you're losing opportunities you might not even know existed. And unlike traditional search, where you can at least see that you're on page two and know you need to improve, with AI search, you might have no idea you're missing out unless you're specifically monitoring it.
That's what GEO is about, and that's why we've invested in the tooling to do it properly. We talked more about the broader strategic picture in our post on AI search strategy for marketers, which is worth a read if you want to go deeper into the "what should I actually do about this" question.
GEO isn't a replacement for SEO
We want to be clear about this because the marketing world loves a "this replaces that" narrative, and it's rarely true. GEO doesn't replace SEO. Good SEO is actually one of the best foundations for good GEO, because AI models tend to draw heavily from content that already ranks well and reads as authoritative. If your SEO fundamentals are weak, your GEO will be weak too.
What GEO does is add a new layer. It's an additional channel where your business needs to be visible, and it requires some specific attention and measurement that traditional SEO tools don't provide. Think of it as making sure you're not just in the race but also on the panel, to go back to our earlier analogy.
Where we go from here
We're in the relatively early days of GEO as a discipline, and we'll be honest about that. The tools are maturing fast (Otterly.ai was named a Gartner Cool Vendor for AI in Marketing and a G2 High Performer, which gives us confidence we've backed the right horse), but things are still shifting. AI models update frequently, new platforms emerge, and the rules of what gets cited and what doesn't are still being written.
What we can say is that businesses that start paying attention to this now, rather than waiting until it's "settled", will be in a much stronger position. It's a bit like the early days of SEO itself. The companies that took it seriously in 2005 had a massive head start over those who waited until 2015. We think GEO is at a similar inflexion point.
If you'd like to know how your business is currently showing up (or not) in AI search results, we're happy to have a no-strings-attached chat about it. We can run an initial check with Otterly.ai and give you a straight answer on where you stand and whether it's worth investing time. No hard sell, no commitment, just a 15-minute conversation to see if this is something that matters for your particular market. Get in touch, and we'll set something up.
