Where it gets stuck.
customer asks ChatGPT, 'What's a good supplier for travertine in the US?' The model responds with three or four brand names — pulled from its training data, augmented by Bing search results, weighted by structured-data citations. Your brand is on that list, or it isn't. Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the discipline of making your site retrievable in those responses. For material brands selling stone, tile, wood, and slab, GEO has a different shape than for SaaS or consumer DTC — the queries are more specific, the citation surface is smaller, and the structured-data signal matters more.
Why it happens.
LLMs cite from sources they can retrieve cleanly. The structured data that drives GEO for material brands: Product schema with detailed material specifications, FAQPage schema with technical questions answered in plain language, Service schema for trade and B2B programs, Organization schema with industry-specific keywords in alternateName and serviceType. The content that drives GEO: long-form pages that answer questions with explicit material context ('How is travertine sealed?' vs. 'How are stones sealed?'), origin and provenance content that signals authoritativeness, and FAQ blocks on every category page so the model can lift the answer verbatim.
The size of it.
A brand we audited had 480 SKUs of natural stone, perfect Shopify product schema, and zero AI search visibility. The gap was content — no FAQ on any page, no provenance content for the materials, no Service schema for the trade program. After adding FAQPage schema on every product detail page, Service schema for trade, and eighteen educational long-form articles answering specific material questions, the brand went from zero ChatGPT citations to being named in 14% of 'stone supplier' prompts inside 4 months. GEO is not a separate channel. It is what SEO becomes when the search interface stops being a SERP and starts being a model.
Filed from inside a working engagement. Edited only for client privacy — the numbers and the mechanisms are exact.