For SME owners in 2026, the question isn’t just ‘What do you know about AI?’ – it’s increasingly ‘What does AI know about your business?’

In the first half of last year, AI-referred sessions – where a user clicks on a website link provided by a chatbot – skyrocketed by 527 per cent. While many business owners are still learning to use AI for internal tasks like drafting emails or scheduling, a new front has opened in the battle for customer attention, inside AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. 

Short for Generative Engine Optimization, GEO, it’s the strategic tailoring of a brand’s digital footprint so that AI assistants recognise it as a trusted source and recommend it directly to users. It’s the difference between being the business ChatGPT recommends and being one that simply no longer appears in the conversation.

Managing Director of FTI Consulting and reputation strategist Asha Oberoi believes SME owners must now view AI as a dual priority. “I think there are two sides of the coin,” she explains. “AI for scalability and operational efficiency on one side and AI for discoverability, reputation and brand awareness on the other. Both present a risk and an opportunity.” 

A Holiday Snapshot Proves Why GEO Matters

To explain why GEO matters to businesses, Oberoi cites her recent holiday to Japan. In three weeks, she didn’t open Google once. Instead, she relied entirely on an AI assistant nicknamed Bob to navigate her journey, highlighting a massive shift in consumer trust.

“If he said, ‘Go to this tempura restaurant on the corner of the street you’re on,’ I didn’t second guess, I didn’t check any reviews, because he had already done that. He’d already scoured TripAdvisor, and so I went straight there,” she explains. “With my brand and reputation hat on, I was thinking, ‘Wow, if you’re not being recommended and if you’re not discoverable, then you’re losing out in this game straight away.’” 

As ChatGPT processes 2 billion queries daily, Oberoi says ultimately GEO is about “being found and being chosen above another brand for a product or for a service.”

Your Website Could Be Blocking AI Access

When she audits clients for GEO, Oberoi says the obstacles are often technical. “You pull the thread and it leads back to some very basic elements of website design, like load pages,” she says.

AI answer engines and search engines both rely on technically-accessible, well-structured websites. Clear, organised code and structured data help these systems understand what a business does. They also look for consistent information about a company across multiple trusted sources online. Sites built with outdated frameworks, poor structure or content hidden behind paywalls and lead capture forms can be difficult for bots to crawl and interpret, even if they appear fine to human visitors.

Many small businesses are currently hindered by “old, clunky, poorly-performing websites” that haven’t been updated in years and lack the necessary technical structure for AI retrieval, Oberoi notes.

But technical accessibility alone isn’t enough. “Behind it are some very basic fundamentals around reputation, trust, authority. They all still apply and are actually more important than ever,” she says. AI engines prioritize sources with authoritative mentions across the web, consistent citations, and signals of expertise and trustworthiness – the credibility markers that determine whether a business gets recommended.

Leaders Must Speak Up For AI To Hear

Oberoi says building authority and visibility through GEO requires the full participation of the person who usually has the most of both: the owner or CEO.

“There used to be a day when you could keep your head down and just focus on the operations and running of the business. But, more than ever, the company brand is tied in with who the leadership is, and for leadership to be present in a digital world.”

In one US study, 77 per cent of adults said a leader’s reputation influenced their investment decisions, while another report found 45 per cent of a company’s market value was tied to the CEO’s public persona.

As a LinkedIn Top Voice, Oberoi says the platform now plays a vital role in establishing authority among humans and AI. AI models regard LinkedIn as a high-authority data anchor because it provides the verified, structured signals that validate a leader’s professional identity and confirm credibility.

“Many leaders that I come across, perhaps of an older generation, aren’t necessarily comfortable with having a LinkedIn profile or speaking publicly,” she says. “But in the age we’re living in, if you don’t fill that void and narrative, then something else will, and you don’t want to let a competitor, or, God forbid, an AI engine make that determination for your business.”

Ensure All The Building Blocks Are In Place 

While Oberoi stresses the importance of GEO, she says there’s one important caveat for businesses wanting to improve their discoverability: they must first ensure they have AI capability within the rest of their operating systems.

“I don’t think it’s possible to do an AI transformation within the business if you haven’t first done a digital transformation,” she says. “That’s a key thing. GEO is also linked to how the business is run, and to master AI, you first need to have done digital transformation well.”

By this, she means online platforms and automation for tasks like compliance and payroll, e-commerce capabilities and other operational tools.

Employment Hero Product Manager, AI Russell Dias agrees with the need to prioritise. “For small businesses, pulling all this together is genuinely hard, especially when teams are lean and systems have grown over time,” he says. “If core systems aren’t integrated or consistently maintained, GEO efforts are constrained by the quality of the underlying data, regardless of how much optimisation is applied on top. In practice, AI can only reflect what a business is actually doing day to day.”

Getting Started With GEO: Your Action Plan

For businesses that are ready to pursue GEO, Oberoi says owners can take practical steps to perform their own audit.

Test your website speed

Use Google PageSpeed Insights to check load time. Fast, well-structured websites are more likely to be crawled, indexed and trusted, which indirectly improves visibility in both search and AI-generated answers.

Search for yourself using different AI models 

Use a range of AI assistants to see what they say about your business and competitors, keeping in mind that answers can vary.

Make yourself visible 

B2B leaders should be consistently active on LinkedIn. Name yourself and senior staff in all media materials instead of ‘company spokesman.’

Check for brand confusion 

Search your business name in AI platforms to ensure you aren’t being confused with other entities with similar wording while systems are still learning.

Invest in ‘earned media’

Media placements provide powerful authority signals to AI. Pursue interviews and named quotes rather than anonymous statements. If you can’t attract coverage, a posted media release still ranks highly. 

Act now

The window for early advantage is closing. As Oberoi puts it: “You’ve got to be in it now. I don’t think you can wait around a year.”