Found on Google, quoted by the machines
Two audiences read your website now. One of them is a machine writing an answer, and it quotes pages that are easy to quote.
For twenty years the job was to appear in a list of links. That job still exists. A second one arrived beside it: appearing inside the answer a machine writes above that list, with your name on it.
SEO is the work of ranking in a list of search results. GEO, generative engine optimisation, is the work of being quoted in an AI-written answer. They share most of their foundations: clean HTML, one clear heading per idea, structured data, fast pages and facts stated plainly enough to be lifted. Every site we build ships with all of that in the markup from the first commit.
What changed
An answer engine does not rank pages, it reads them and writes a paragraph. To be in that paragraph your page has to be readable by a machine, quotable in one piece, and specific enough to be worth quoting.
That last part is where most business websites fail. A page that says it delivers quality service tailored to your needs contains no fact. There is nothing in it to lift. A page that says a landing page is 1,000 EUR and ships in 3 business days can be quoted directly, and it is.
What both jobs need
- HTML that says what it means. One h1, headings in order, real lists, real tables. A page built out of nested boxes with styled text in them is harder to read than it looks.
- Structured data. Organization, Service, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList. This page carries its own, and so does every other page on this site.
- Speed. Slow pages are crawled less and abandoned more. Nothing here ships a page builder runtime, which is most of the difference.
- One page per idea. A page covering four services ranks for none of them and gets quoted for none of them.
- Facts with numbers in them. A price, a duration, a count. These are what both a ranking algorithm and a language model can hold on to.
What GEO needs on top
Two things, mostly.
A self-contained answer near the top. Every page on this site opens with a short block that answers its own question in full, without needing the paragraph before it. That is deliberate, and you are looking at one.
Consistency across the web. An answer engine gains confidence in a fact when it finds it stated the same way in more than one place. The same name, the same description and the same numbers on your site, your listings and your profiles is worth more than another 500 words.
What is built into every site
- A unique title and meta description per page, written rather than generated.
- One h1 per page and headings that follow the argument.
- JSON-LD structured data appropriate to the page type.
- A sitemap and a robots file, generated rather than maintained by hand.
- Canonical URLs, and hreflang on every language pair if the site has more than one.
- Open Graph and Twitter cards, so a shared link renders properly.
- Internal links that are designed, so authority moves between pages instead of pooling on the home page.
None of that is an add-on and none of it is a monthly service. It is in the markup from the first commit because retro-fitting it later costs more than doing it right.
What is not promised
No one can promise a position. Anyone who does is either guessing or selling you something else.
What is promised is the part that is actually in our control: the technical foundation is correct on day 1, the content is written to be quotable, and nothing about the build is working against you. Rankings come from that plus time plus whatever your competition is doing.
Hans at 't Kippegie put the result more plainly than we would: they come up in the AI answers now, not only in Google. There is a longer piece on the mechanics on the blog: getting cited in AI answers.