For twenty years, companies have learned how to become visible on Google. They worked on their natural referencing, keywords, backlinks, landing pages, paid campaigns, and social media presence. Digital marketing was built around a simple idea: being found at the right time by the right customer.
This logic remains important. But it is no longer enough.
A new layer of intermediation is gradually being established between brands and their audiences: conversational artificial intelligences. When a user asks an AI: “Which brand is the most credible in this market?”, “Which hotel should I choose for a business trip?” or “Which solution would you recommend for an SME?”, their search behavior changes profoundly. They no longer simply consult a list of links. They receive a synthetic, hierarchical, argued, and sometimes even prescriptive response.
This is where GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, comes in. GEO refers to all practices enabling a brand, company, leader, or expertise to be correctly understood, cited, recommended, and contextualized by generative AIs.
The subject may seem technical. It is actually deeply strategic. Because in a world where AIs are beginning to respond in place of traditional search engines, a brand can be absent from a recommendation without even knowing it has been ruled out. It can lose an opportunity without receiving traffic to its site. It can be poorly described by an AI, reduced to a former activity, associated with a wrong positioning, or made invisible compared to competitors whose digital ecosystem is clearer.
GEO therefore does not replace SEO. It expands it. It forces companies to no longer only ask themselves: “Are we visible on Google?” but also: “What do artificial intelligences understand about our expertise, credibility, and value?”
A Silent Rupture in the Buyer’s Journey
One of the most important lessons from the conversation I had with Emmanuel Dollé from Bubbling lies in this idea: large language models are becoming a new checkpoint in the buyer’s journey. Yesterday, a customer searched on Google, compared several sites, read reviews, possibly consulted social networks, then made their decision. Today, they can ask a complete question to a conversational AI and get an already organized response.
They can ask which are the best service providers to support an AI transformation in an SME, which solution would be most suitable for a heavily regulated organization, which French experts work on AI and governance, or which brands seem most reliable in a specific field. In this situation, the company no longer directly controls the journey. It does not necessarily welcome the visitor to its site. It does not always measure the click. It does not necessarily see the request. It does not know if it has been cited, forgotten, or misrepresented.
This is a major transformation for entrepreneurs. For years, they learned to produce content to attract traffic. Now, they must also produce content to be understood by systems capable of synthesizing, comparing, and recommending.
Visibility is no longer only played out on the results page. It is played out in the algorithmic representation of the brand.
Being Visible Starts with Being Readable
The first mistake would be to consider GEO as a simple matter of technical optimization. It partly is. But it starts with a more fundamental question: is your brand clear enough to be understood by an artificial intelligence?
A generative AI has no intuition. It reconstructs a representation from available signals: website, articles, biographies, interviews, external mentions, reviews, social pages, structured content, semantic repetitions, reliable sources, consistency of public information. If your company describes itself differently according to pages, if your promise changes from one network to another, if your expertise is scattered, or if your site does not clearly answer your customers’ questions, the AI will have trouble positioning you.
A brand visible in AIs is first and foremost a readable brand.
This requires clearly stating who you are, who you work for, what problem you solve, what proof demonstrates your expertise, and in what context you should be recommended. A consulting firm that wants to be visible on queries related to AI strategy must explicitly say that it supports leaders, executive committees, and boards of directors on AI strategy, governance, adoption, risks, and value creation. If it simply talks about innovation, digital transformation, or performance without precisely naming its territory, it leaves AIs to interpret its positioning.
An industrial company that wants to be recommended for its expertise in predictive maintenance must explain its use cases, sectors, methods, results, and constraints. A health brand that wants to emerge on cognitive prevention must clearly distinguish its areas of intervention, regulatory limits, evidence, and scientific approach. A local business, restaurant, or hotel must also clarify what establishes its reputation: quality of service, customer experience, consistency of reviews, regularity of information, tangible signs of trust. GEO rewards clarity.
Stabilizing an Identity Statement
A brand should be able to be summarized in one sentence. Not an advertising slogan, but a formulation precise enough for both a human and a machine to immediately understand what it does, who it works for, and what value it brings.
This sentence must be repeated consistently on the site, social networks, speaker biographies, conference pages, articles, press releases, and interviews. In GEO, repetition is not a weakness. It becomes a signal of consistency.
A company can, for example, state that it helps leaders transform artificial intelligence into measurable value through an approach combining strategy, governance, and organizational transformation. An industrial SME can explain that it supports its clients in optimizing their processes through automation and predictive analysis solutions. A health company can specify that it develops neuro-nutrition solutions designed to support cognitive health, nervous balance, and human performance, in compliance with the regulatory framework.
This sentence must be specific. It should not be able to be copy-pasted by a hundred competitors. It must integrate the target audience, the problem addressed, and the value created.
In an environment where AIs synthesize thousands of contents in a few seconds, consistency becomes a competitive advantage.
Answering Customers’ Real Questions
Generative AIs favor content capable of directly answering a question. Entrepreneurs must therefore move away from a purely institutional logic and create useful pages. A site can no longer simply present a company, its services, and its history. It must also answer the questions that customers actually ask.
How to build an AI strategy for an executive committee? How to measure the return on investment of an AI project? How to avoid Shadow AI in a company? How to make a brand visible in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity? How to prepare teams for AI adoption? How to choose an AI conference for a leadership event?
These questions are not anecdotal. They correspond to the way users now question AIs. Each page should therefore clearly answer the question asked from the first lines, then develop a structured analysis, concrete examples, common mistakes, a method, and an actionable conclusion.
You must produce content clear enough to help generative systems understand your expertise. The boundary between content useful for humans and content readable by AIs becomes very narrow here. Well-written, well-structured, precise, and documented content serves both audiences.
Organizing Proofs of Authority
AIs do not simply read what you say about yourself. They also rely on available authority signals. For an entrepreneur, these signals can be published interviews, conferences, books, in-depth articles, citations by partners, participation in events, customer reviews, case studies. They can also be institutional mentions or content in recognized media.
The problem is that many entrepreneurs already have these proofs but do not structure them. They have given conferences, but event pages disappear. They have been interviewed, but links are not integrated into their site. They have supported interesting clients but publish no anonymized case studies. They have real expertise, but it is not connected to specific queries.
GEO requires organizing proofs.
A company can create a page presenting its interventions, expertise themes, addressed audiences, and supported sectors. It can also publish anonymized cases to show real situations without violating confidentiality. An industrial group can be presented through the modernization of critical processes, prioritization of AI use cases, governance, and change management. A heavily regulated organization can illustrate the challenges of AI usage policy, risk control, and human responsibility. A distribution company can show how it identifies high-impact use cases, measures value, and improves decision quality. This type of content helps both prospects and AIs. It shows what the company actually does.
Thinking in Entities, Not Just Keywords
Traditional SEO has long emphasized keywords. GEO also requires thinking in entities. An entity can be a person, company, book, product, expertise, place, event, or institution. AIs must understand the relationships between these entities.
A leader can be linked to their consulting firm, a book, conference activity, sector expertise, and territory. A company can be linked to a technology, sector, type of customer, method, use cases, and external proofs. The clearer these relationships are, the more the AI can reconstruct a reliable representation.
For an SME, this means precisely explaining what it manufactures, in which sectors it operates, which customers it supports, which problems it solves, which proofs support its expertise, and which commitments establish its credibility. AIs do not guess. They connect signals. The more consistent these signals are, the more understandable the brand becomes.
Taking Care of External Content
A common mistake is to concentrate everything on one’s own site. However, generative AIs also rely on external content. An entrepreneur must therefore ask how they are described on their partners’ sites, whether their LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Substack, or YouTube profiles all say the same thing. Also whether the biographies used for conferences repeat the right words.
If all sources repeat the same identity, authority is strengthened. GEO is a discipline of consistency.
Digital Footprints Become Strategic
For local brands, restaurants, hotels, cultural venues, shops, offices, schools, health centers, or institutions, digital reputation is also built in micro-signals. Google reviews, photos, hours, responses to comments, descriptions, information consistency, mentions in articles, presence on maps, quality of lived experiences.
These elements are often perceived as secondary. They no longer are.
In the era of conversational AIs, these traces become raw material. When an AI recommends a place, restaurant, hotel, or service provider, it can rely on public signals that say something about trust, satisfaction, consistency, and reputation.
A restaurant that regularly publishes its information, receives detailed reviews, responds seriously, has recent photos, and appears in reliable guides sends more signals than an establishment whose digital presence is neglected. A consulting firm whose articles are structured, interventions documented, and expertise repeated will be more readable than a firm that settles for a generic brochure. Future visibility will be built on the accumulation of consistent traces.
Auditing What AIs Already Say About You
The first concrete action to take is simple: question the AIs. An entrepreneur can regularly test queries such as: “Who is this brand?”, “What does this company do?”, “Who are the best players in this sector?”, “Which company would you recommend for this specific need?”, “Compare this brand with its competitors,” or “Who are the French experts on this subject?”
Responses must be analyzed methodically. Is the brand cited? Is it well described? Do its competitors appear? Is the information up to date? Does the AI invent elements? Which attributes are associated with the brand? What blind spots appear?
This audit must be performed on several tools, as responses can vary greatly between models. Do not settle for a single platform. The objective is not to control everything. That is impossible. The objective is to understand how the brand is interpreted.
Building a GEO Content Strategy
An effective GEO strategy relies on three types of content. The first is identity content. It explains who you are, what you do, for whom, and why. It must be stable, clear, and well-structured. The second is expertise content. It answers your customers’ questions and demonstrates your understanding of the subject: articles, FAQs, guides, white papers, case studies, transcribed conferences. The third is proof content. It shows that your expertise is recognized: interviews, events, citations, testimonials, references, publications, awards, contributions.
These three levels must be connected. A page dedicated to AI strategy must point to articles on governance, anonymized cases, a diagnostic page, and a contact page. An AI conferences page must mention themes, audiences, intervention examples, biographies, and associated content. A GEO page must explain the method, issues, risks, benefits, and offer an audit.
The challenge is not to pile up content. It is to create a readable ecosystem.
Not Confusing Visibility with Credibility
GEO is not just about appearing in a response. It is about appearing with the right level of credibility. A brand can be cited but poorly positioned. It can be visible but associated with an outdated offer. It can be known but not recommended. It can be mentioned but without clear differentiation.
The question is therefore not only: “Does the AI talk about us?” The real question is: “Does the AI talk about us in the way we want to be understood?”
This is particularly important for entrepreneurs who have several activities. A leader can be simultaneously founder, speaker, author, investor, consultant, or researcher. If the digital ecosystem does not clearly prioritize these roles, the AI may retain the least strategic one.
You must therefore organize your presence according to the main objective.
Structured Data: A Discreet but Useful Lever
GEO is also technical. Entrepreneurs must check a few simple elements: their site must be indexable, their sitemap active, their SEO titles clear, their French and English pages well separated, their structured data correctly filled in. Article tags for publications, Person for profiles, Organization for the company, Book for a work, or FAQ for frequently asked questions facilitate understanding of the site by search engines.
These elements are not enough to guarantee visibility in AIs. But they improve the readability of the digital ecosystem. Excellent but poorly structured content remains more difficult to interpret.
A Long-Term Discipline
Many entrepreneurs will look for a quick recipe. They will be disappointed. GEO is not limited to a few prompts, a few keywords, or a few optimized pages. It relies on an accumulation of signals over time.
Producing useful content, structuring and connecting information, highlighting proofs of expertise, maintaining digital reputation, regularly updating content, observing how AIs describe the company, and correcting inconsistencies are now part of the fundamentals of visibility in the age of artificial intelligence.
In this new environment, the strongest brands may be those that have understood one simple thing: AIs do not only recommend what is visible. They recommend what is readable, consistent, credible, and sufficiently documented.
Conclusion: Being Visible in AIs Means First Being Intelligible
Generative AIs are not just changing marketing tools. They are changing the way brands are discovered, compared, and recommended.
GEO is therefore becoming a new strategic skill for entrepreneurs. You should not abandon SEO, nor chase after every new platform. You must understand that digital visibility is entering a new phase.
Yesterday, you had to be found. Today, you must also be understood. Tomorrow, you will need to be recommended by systems capable of synthesizing your reputation even before the customer visits your site.
For entrepreneurs, the question becomes central: if an artificial intelligence had to explain your value to a potential customer, would it have enough reliable, consistent, and precise information to do so correctly?
If the answer is no, GEO work starts now.
EntrepreneurIA Tips: 10 Concrete Actions to Improve Your Visibility in Generative AIs
| Action | Why It Matters | Do It Now |
| Clarify your positioning | An AI cannot recommend what it does not clearly understand. | Summarize your company in one simple sentence: who you are, who you work for, and what value you bring. |
| Check what AIs already say about you | You will discover how your brand is currently interpreted. | Query ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity with searches about your company and competitors. |
| Create a detailed “About Us” page | AIs look for explicit information about people and organizations. | Describe your history, expertise, leaders, activities, and areas of intervention. |
| Answer your customers’ questions | AIs favor content that provides concrete answers. | Transform your prospects’ most frequent questions into articles or FAQs. |
| Document your use cases | Concrete proofs are stronger than marketing promises. | Publish anonymized examples of projects, results, or transformations achieved. |
| Structure your proofs of authority | Conferences, interviews, and publications strengthen your credibility. | Create a page gathering your interventions, media, books, podcasts, and articles. |
| Harmonize your digital presence | Inconsistencies blur AIs’ understanding. | Verify that your site, LinkedIn, biographies, and social networks tell the same story. |
| Take care of your digital reputation | Reviews, recommendations, and mentions become trust signals. | Respond to reviews, update your listings, and encourage authentic testimonials. |
| Think in ecosystem, not isolated pages | AIs better understand content connected to each other. | Link your articles, service pages, case studies, and expert profiles. |
| Regularly audit your GEO visibility | GEO evolves rapidly with AI models. | Conduct a quarterly audit to identify progress, errors, and opportunities. |
The Question to Ask
If a leader asked ChatGPT today:
“Which company would you recommend in your field?”
Would your brand appear?
And above all, would it appear with the positioning you actually want to defend?
Pascale Caron
AI Strategy, Governance and Transformation Consulting
Conferences • Leadership Advisory • EntrepreneurIA
