For two decades, being found online meant one thing for a small business: a place on the first page of Google. That is changing. A growing share of customers now put their question straight to an AI assistant, whether ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity, and read a short answer that names a handful of companies. The firms in that answer get the call, and they start the conversation with a head start.

The discipline that deals with this shift has a name, Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, and a new category of tools has grown around it: GEO software, built to measure and improve a company’s AI visibility.

A crowded answer with very few seats

How many companies does an AI name in a single answer? Sorank, an SEO and GEO software company, has measured it for 13 months. Between August 2025 and August 2026 it sent a monthly panel of buyer questions to five AI models and extracted every source they cited: 301,025 answers in all, containing 1,820,738 citations spread across 131,349 different websites.

The results show how scarce the seats are. ChatGPT names on average 4.1 sources per answer, Claude 3.5 and Perplexity 3.3. Gemini is more generous at 11.1. On ChatGPT, the most cited platforms are household names: Wikipedia leads with 3.43 citations per 100 answers, followed by the review site Trustpilot at 2.7 and Microsoft at 1.14. In ChatGPT’s ranking, the top three sources account for 58% of the citations counted.

For a small or mid-sized business competing with national brands, that concentration is the challenge. With three or four seats per answer, a firm needs to be both visible and credible to be picked.

What GEO software does

Search tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs and Google Search Console have long measured where a website ranks on Google. GEO software puts a different question at the centre: whether a business is named in AI answers, on the questions its customers ask.

Its core feature is prompt tracking. A GEO platform runs a list of buyer questions, or prompts, through several AI models on a regular schedule, records which companies are cited, and shows which competitors appear in place of the business. The more complete platforms then act on it: they identify the topics to cover, write the pages that answer those questions, and publish them on the company’s website.

“When a customer asks an AI who to call, the only thing that matters is whether your name is in the answer,” said Thibault Besson-Magdelain, founder of Sorank. “The first step is to measure it, question by question, month after month, and then to publish the pages that earn the citation.”

How UK businesses can improve their AI visibility now

The data points to a few practical steps any firm can take to rank on ChatGPT and the other AI assistants, with or without specialist GEO software.

Describe the business the same way everywhere. AI models piece together what they know about a company from many websites. The same name, the same one-line description and the same category on the company website, social profiles, directories and partner pages give them one clear picture rather than several conflicting ones.

Invest in reviews. Trustpilot is the second most cited platform on ChatGPT in Sorank’s study. For questions such as “which accountant in London is reliable?”, recent and detailed reviews are among the most direct ways to feed the answer.

Write one clear page per service. Because ChatGPT names so few sources, it favours pages that answer a question completely: a clear definition, plain facts, sources for any figures. One thorough page on a service is worth more than several thin ones.

Track the same prompts over time. The number of sources ChatGPT names has swung widely, from 7.4 per answer in February 2026 to 1.7 in June, before settling at 4.1 in August. A single check says little. A monthly panel of the questions customers ask shows the real trend.

A shift that rewards early movers

The study has limits its authors acknowledge: the question panel reflects the sectors of Sorank’s users and leans towards French-language questions, and a citation in an answer and a visit to a website are two different measures. But the direction is clear. As more customers start their search with an AI assistant, the short list it gives them becomes a shop window, and the businesses that secure a seat in it early will be the hardest to displace.

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