For twenty years, "being found" had a stable definition: rank on Google, win the click, convert the visit. An entire industry, ours included, grew around those three steps. Quietly, a growing share of buying journeys now skips all of them.
When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity for "the best charity for water projects" or "a boutique hotel in Madrid worth the money", the model answers. Sometimes it cites sources; often it simply names brands. Either way, a shortlist has been formed and acted on without a single blue link being seen. If you're not in the model's answer, you were never in the running, and your analytics will show nothing at all.
Rank was the old metric. Citation is the new one.
Position on a results page is becoming a proxy for the question that actually matters: when models answer questions in your category, how often are you the answer? We call this your citation rate, and unlike rankings it can't be read off a single tool. It has to be measured by asking the engines what they say about your market, repeatedly, across models, and tracking how the answers move.
SEO asked: do you rank? GEO asks: are you the answer?
What actually moves it
The early evidence is unromantic. Models lean on sources they can parse and corroborate: structured data, consistent entity descriptions, third-party coverage, genuinely useful content that other sites reference. The fundamentals of good SEO still matter, but the target has shifted from persuading an algorithm to rank a page, to persuading a model that your brand is the safe, citable answer.
There's also a hard commercial edge here. AI referrals are small in volume today and growing fast, and they convert disproportionately well, the assistant has pre-sold the recommendation. Brands that establish citation share early will be the incumbents the models keep repeating. These systems have habits.
We now treat generative engine optimisation as a standing line in search engagements: baseline your citation rate, fix what stops models trusting you, measure quarterly. Unglamorous, early, and exactly where search was in 2003, which is rather the point.