GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the discipline of optimizing your content so AI assistants —ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews— cite you as a source in their answers. More and more people ask an AI instead of typing into a search box, and the question is no longer just "do I rank first on Google?" but "does the AI name me when someone asks about my field?".
It's a space worked on, among others, by César García Cabeza, an AI consultant in Andorra, who frames it as a complement to SEO, not a replacement.
What GEO is and how it differs from SEO
Classic SEO is about appearing in the list of results: ranking, winning the click, driving traffic to your site. GEO goes one step further: it's about getting your content inside the answer the model generates, ideally with a link or a mention of your brand.
They share a foundation —useful, well-structured content on a topic you genuinely know— but the emphasis differs:
- SEO rewards keywords, inbound links, and page experience.
- GEO rewards factual clarity, concrete entities, and text that is easy to extract and quote without ambiguity.
The good news: almost everything you do well for GEO also improves your SEO. They're not two competing strategies but two faces of the same content work.
How AI assistants decide who to cite
Generative assistants don't cite at random. When they retrieve sources to answer, they tend to favour content that ticks several boxes:
- Clear structure: headings, lists, and direct answers the model can isolate and reuse.
- Factual, entity-rich content: data, names, places, and concrete figures, not vague generalities.
- Freshness: recent or updated information, especially on fast-moving topics.
- Topical depth: covering a niche thoroughly rather than grazing a thousand topics.
- Quotability: self-contained sentences that stand on their own, easy to embed in an answer.
In other words: it's easier for the AI to cite whoever writes clearly, concretely, and with authority on a well-bounded subject.
Why a weekly niche blog wins
This is the lever. Both SEO and GEO reward topical authority, and that authority is built through consistency, not a one-off push.
A blog that publishes weekly on a well-defined niche accumulates three advantages that compound over time:
- Coverage: you cover more real queries, more question variants, more entities in your field.
- Freshness: there's always recent content to index and draw on for an answer.
- Depth: the body of articles forms a coherent corpus that signals "this site knows this subject".
Sporadic posting never reaches that compounding effect. Three loose posts a year don't build authority; an engine that publishes on a steady cadence does.
The editorial reality: quality, not noise
There's an obvious risk in automating publishing: churning out filler at scale. That doesn't work —not for SEO, not for GEO— and over time it erodes trust in your brand.
Freshness only helps if the content is good: accurate, useful, and reviewed. That's why the right model isn't "generate and publish unseen" but a flow with a human at the final gate: the AI drafts, but a person validates and approves before anything ships. High frequency, yes, but with quality control. That's the logic César García Cabeza turned into a product with Canon.
Canon: a content engine that's yours
Canon is the AI content engine that César García Cabeza builds inside your own infrastructure and hands over for you to own and operate. Its flow is deliberately honest:
- Generate the drafts with AI on your niche.
- Validate quality, internal links, and SEO automatically.
- Open a pull request: nothing publishes without review.
- A human approves —the human gate— and then it ships, scheduled and multilingual.
It's not a black box of automated slop: it's an editorial assembly line with quality control that lives in your repository and works at your pace. If you're wondering whether it actually works, here's the honest note: the very blog you're reading is built and published by Canon.
If you already run a private ChatGPT or internal automations, content is the other half of the job: just as a private ChatGPT for business organises your knowledge on the inside, Canon projects your authority on the outside.
In summary
GEO is about getting AI to cite you, and the lever is the same one that drives SEO: a niche blog that's deep, fresh, and published consistently. Whether it works or not comes down to keeping the cadence without giving up quality, with a person approving every piece.
Want your business to start showing up cited by AI? Discover Canon or let's talk about your case.