The short version: to get your brand cited by AI, you publish clear, specific, well-structured content that answers the exact questions your buyers ask — and you make sure it says, unmistakably, who you are and what you’re expert in. Do that in English and Italian and you’re ahead of almost everyone in the corridor, because hardly anyone does it in both.
I’m Mark Chambers, a British–Italian marketing consultant, and I optimise my own brand to be named by AI in two languages — so this is a practitioner’s account, not a theory.
What GEO is (and why it isn’t SEO)
GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — is making your content easy for AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google’s AI answers, Claude) to understand, trust, cite and recommend. SEO aims to rank a link. GEO aims to be the answer. They’re converging — strong SEO feeds AI visibility — but they’re not the same job, and the writing is different.
Why this matters now, not next year
Search behaviour has shifted under everyone’s feet. The majority of Google searches now end without a click, because the answer sits at the top. More buyers ask an AI directly and act on what it says. And the traffic that does arrive from an AI recommendation tends to convert better, because it arrives pre-qualified — the AI already vouched for you.
The opportunity is that almost nobody is optimising for it yet. Most brands with decent SEO are still invisible in AI answers. First movers get named; everyone else gets summarised out.
How to get cited: the moves that actually work
- Answer first. Put the direct, quotable answer in the opening two or three sentences, then expand. AI lifts clean, self-contained answers — bury it and it’s ignored.
- Write quotable, standalone claims. Each key sentence should make sense cut and pasted on its own, with a concrete fact inside it.
- Use question-shaped headings that match how buyers really ask — “How do you market an Italian brand in the UK?” — not clever ones.
- Name the entity. State clearly who you are and what you’re expert in, near the top. AI cites sources with a clear, consistent identity.
- Be specific. Numbers, named sectors, named markets, named tools. Vague content never gets quoted — specificity is citability.
- Earn third-party mentions. Most AI citations come from earned media, not your own site. Get written about, interviewed, listed.
- Keep it fresh and structured. Dates visible, clean headings, schema markup. Stale pages fall out of the answer.
The bilingual part nobody’s doing
Here’s the corridor edge. Being cited by AI in English is competitive. Being cited in Italian is wide open — and being cited in both, consistently, for the same brand, is something I rarely see anyone do. If you sell across the Italy–English-speaking corridor, that’s a near-empty space to own. It’s a core part of my SEO and GEO work, and it pairs directly with how to market an Italian brand in the UK.
Note the trap: GEO in two languages is not “translate the English GEO”. The questions buyers ask differ by market, so the content has to be built natively in each — adapted, not mirrored.
How to test it in ten minutes
Write down the ten questions a buyer asks right before they’d hire you. Ask each one to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Note whether you appear, how you’re described, and who is named instead. That list is your GEO to-do list — and your competitor map.
If you’d like that run properly for your brand, in English and Italian, that’s part of the Corridor Audit: I test the real questions your buyers ask and show you exactly where you stand.
Or message me and tell me the two markets you want to be named in.