Short answer
Healthcare GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation, is about being recognised as a trustworthy source that generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini choose to cite or draw from when answering a healthcare-related question, as opposed to appearing in a traditional search results page or a featured snippet.
How GEO differs from AEO and SEO
SEO is about ranking in a results list. AEO is about being extracted as a direct answer by search engines and featured-answer systems. GEO is about something a step further removed: being one of a smaller, more selective set of sources a generative AI model draws from when it synthesises a conversational answer, often without showing the person any list of sources at all. The underlying trust signals overlap significantly, but the mechanism by which each system selects a source differs.
What actually influences GEO performance
Consistency matters heavily: your practice name, services, location and credentials described the same way across your website and every external listing, since generative systems appear to weigh this kind of consistency when assessing trust. Structured data, Organization and ProfessionalService schema in particular, gives these systems a machine-readable description of who you are and what you offer, rather than requiring them to infer it from unstructured text. And genuinely specific, evidence-based content tends to be favoured over vague, generic marketing copy when a system is choosing what to cite.
Why this is a real, current opportunity
Very few healthcare marketing agencies are actively working on GEO yet, largely because it's genuinely new and the underlying platforms are still evolving quickly. Practices that invest in strong entity signals and consistent, structured information now are positioned to establish a visibility advantage that becomes harder for slower-moving competitors to close later, similar to how early movers on mobile-first design built a lasting edge in an earlier shift.
What remains genuinely uncertain
The specific factors these systems weigh aren't fully public and change as the underlying models are updated, so no agency, including ours, can promise a guaranteed citation. What can honestly be offered is a meaningfully improved likelihood, through structure and consistency, along with ongoing testing as the platforms evolve, rather than a one-off fix treated as permanently solved.
How a practice can start testing its own GEO visibility
Before investing heavily, it is worth simply asking ChatGPT or Gemini a handful of realistic questions a prospective patient might ask, a specific service in your suburb, for example, and seeing whether your practice appears at all, and if so, how accurately it is described. This kind of informal testing, repeated every month or two as these platforms update, gives you a genuine baseline and an early signal of whether structural and consistency improvements are having any visible effect, well before you would see it reflected in referral traffic.
Why smaller practices should not assume GEO is only for large groups
It is a reasonable assumption that GEO, being newer and more technical-sounding, mainly benefits large, well-resourced practice groups with dedicated marketing teams, but the opposite is often true in practice. A smaller, single-location practice with clean, consistent, accurate information across a handful of listings can often achieve strong entity consistency faster and more thoroughly than a large group managing dozens of locations with inevitably more inconsistency to untangle, which makes this a genuinely accessible opportunity regardless of practice size.