New GEO Service Lets eCommerce & SaaS Brands Be Cited by AI Assistants

What Happened

Straight Up Search, a Northampton‑based SEO agency, announced on 21 October 2026 that it is launching a new Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) service. The offering is specifically aimed at eCommerce and SaaS brands that want to appear accurately in the answers produced by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.

Key Details

• AI crawler access – GEO sets up llms.txt and robots.txt so that GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others can index a brand’s pages.
• Entity & schema work – Adds Organisation, Product, FAQ and Article structured data, and builds consistent entity signals for Google Knowledge Graph and Wikidata.
• AI brand monitoring – Tracks weekly mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Bing Copilot, measuring share‑of‑voice against competitors.
• Citability work – Scores how likely a brand will be cited by AI tools and delivers a monthly roadmap to improve that score.

The service is positioned as a complement to traditional SEO: “GEO isn’t a replacement for SEO. It’s the same discipline of clear, accurate and well‑structured information, applied to a new kind of search,” said Jamie Irwin, founder and SEO director.

What It Means For Your Business

1. Capture the AI‑first buyer – 70‑plus % of online shoppers now ask an AI assistant for product or software recommendations before opening a browser. If your brand is missing from those answers, you’re losing sales.

2. Control the narrative – By standardising structured data and brand signals, GEO helps you present a consistent story that AI tools can trust and cite.

3. Competitive edge – The monitoring component lets you see how your share‑of‑voice stacks up against rivals and adjust tactics in real time.

4. Future‑proofing – As AI assistants evolve, having a robust GEO foundation keeps your brand relevant across new platforms and voice‑search experiences.

In practice, a SaaS company could use GEO to ensure that its pricing plans, feature lists and customer reviews are all indexed by GPTBot, while an online retailer could optimise product schema to appear in a “best‑selling” snippet in ChatGPT’s answer. The result? More accurate, higher‑ranking answers that drive clicks, leads and conversions.

For local businesses, the impact is similar. If a small bakery wants to be recommended by a conversational AI in a nearby city, GEO can make sure the bakery’s address, opening hours and menu are correctly crawled and structured. The AI assistant will then cite the bakery in its response, giving the business a chance to capture foot‑traffic that would otherwise go to a competitor.

In short, GEO is not just another SEO tool – it’s a bridge between your existing optimisation work and the AI‑centric world of tomorrow. By investing in GEO now, eCommerce and SaaS brands can secure visibility in the most trusted sources of information for the modern buyer.

How GEO Works in Practice

1. Discovery audit – Our team reviews your current site structure, robots.txt, and existing schema. We identify gaps that prevent AI crawlers from accessing key pages.

2. Configuration – We publish an llms.txt file and fine‑tune robots.txt to give GPTBot and other LLM bots the exact permissions they need. We also add or update structured data on product, FAQ and article pages.

3. Entity alignment – We create or update your Organisation schema and link it to your Google Knowledge Graph profile. We also submit a Wikidata edit request if your brand is missing or inaccurate.

4. Monitoring dashboard – You receive a weekly report that shows how often each AI assistant mentions your brand, the sentiment of those mentions and how they compare to your main competitors.

5. Optimization roadmap – Every month we publish a set of actionable recommendations—such as adding missing product images or refining FAQ answers—to boost your citability score.

Success Story (Hypothetical)

A mid‑size SaaS provider with 12,000 monthly visitors saw a 35 % rise in traffic from ChatGPT after implementing GEO. The company’s FAQ schema was expanded, and a new llms.txt file allowed GPTBot to crawl a previously blocked pricing page. Within three months, the brand appeared in 18 % more AI‑generated product reviews than its closest competitor.

Getting Started

• Free 30‑minute audit – Contact us to schedule a complimentary assessment of your AI crawl readiness.
• Custom pricing – GEO packages start at £1,200 per month, with tiered options for larger enterprises.
• Implementation time – Most brands see results within 60 days of launch.