More customers are using ChatGPT and Gemini to research companies before making a purchase. That means the way AI models describe and recommend your organisation has a direct impact on whether people choose you or a competitor.
Most businesses haven’t looked into this yet. I sat down with Tom Mason, founder of AwarenessAI, to talk about the emerging field of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), how businesses can assess their AI visibility, and what can be done to improve it.
Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Tom Mason, and I’m the founder of AwarenessAI. I’ve been researching the field of GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — for just over a year, and working in it for around seven months. Through that work I’ve found some really interesting insights into how AI systems infer trust in organisations, which has allowed me to create a tailored service that helps organisations understand how they’re represented and recommended across different AI models.
How does AwarenessAI improve visibility in AI systems for its clients?
We start by acting as a customer or user who might be asking questions about the organisation — things like “how would you describe X organisation?” or “how would you contact X organisation?” That shows us where the problems are: an AI model like ChatGPT describing an organization incorrectly, for instance, or giving back the wrong contact number. From there, we create opportunities linked to those questions and prompts, aimed at fixing the problem we’re looking at.
How did you know that companies would pay for your service?
In the early days of AwarenessAI, we worked quite a lot with pilot businesses and organisations — to test whether the problem was real, and whether our framework could be used to create opportunities and fix what we were seeing.
One example from the early days was Dark Invader. We asked Gemini a simple question — who is Dark Invader? — and Gemini came back saying it didn’t know of an organisation by that name, and wasn’t sure they were even real. So we created an opportunity for Dark Invader that looked at structured data: becoming more visible and producing machine-readable signals so an AI could understand the organisation. Within 30 days, Gemini came back and described Dark Invader as a trusted organisation. We saw the problem of them not being visible, then created an opportunity that proved the problem was real — and that it could be fixed.
What’s the cost of inaction for brands that don’t take GEO seriously?
When looking at GEO, it’s important to break it down into representation and recommendation risks.
With representation, you’re looking at how an AI describes your organisation. The cost of not taking GEO seriously here is simply not knowing how ChatGPT or Gemini is describing you. I’ve seen cases where ChatGPT is being very cautious about an organisation, or actually telling the user to go elsewhere. That’s the risk: if you don’t understand how you’re being represented, an AI model could be discouraging people from your organisation without you knowing.
With recommendation, the cost is an AI model like ChatGPT recommending a different company when a customer asks something like “what are the top companies in this industry?” or “which companies would you recommend?” Now that AI is acting as the first point of contact, if you’re not being seen within those answers, you can start to lose sales or customers — simply through not being visible in AI models.
What have you learnt writing your book on generative search?
It’s such a fast-moving field. When I wrote that book a couple of months ago, it was really my research notes from the early days of working in generative engine optimisation, and there was a big focus on schema — machine-readable structured data that summarises your website for AI models. Rather than the model seeing hundreds of web pages, it sees what’s important. That was a big focus of the book, because it meant an AI model would cite your website and use it in the user’s prompt.
I’d still say that’s a very big part of it. But a lot of new opportunities have arisen and been given more weight since then, because a big part of GEO is understanding which sources and opportunities are weighted most heavily. Things like an FAQ page — being able to answer user prompts within your own website — have become really important since I wrote the book.
What do companies get from your free AI visibility scan?
Our free visibility scan gives you a baseline — a view of your visibility, reputation and recommendation standing in AI. What I recommend all organisations do is ask very simple prompts about themselves, such as “how do you describe my organisation?”, which lets you see where you currently stand at a baseline level.
The scan covers three things: representation — how an AI describes your organisation; recommendation — the top organisations an AI names in your industry; and reputation — what’s being said about you online by customers or staff. From there, if an organisation doesn’t like what they’re seeing, or thinks there’s an opportunity to improve, they get in touch and we do this on a larger scale: running more prompts and more of the questions a user might ask, and then creating opportunities to improve the answers.
What’s been harder about building AwarenessAI than you anticipated?
The barriers to entry for building a company have never been lower, and there’s never been a better time to start one — with the launch of ChatGPT and Gemini. But that also brings more competition. In the first couple of months of building, it seems quite easy: you’re developing your product and your service. Then it goes to market, and you start to realise there’s more competition than ever. Trying to create sales when you’ve got so many more competitors than you would have had 10 or 20 years ago is extremely hard. So standing out in this market is probably one of the hardest challenges I’ve faced.
What’s it like building a tech company in Leeds?
Leeds offers loads of great opportunities. If you look at the recent launch of the Leeds tech map, it’s really brought the tech community together, and it shows a big advantage of being here — it’s boosting the visibility of Leeds. It’s a great city, and it’s growing really fast. Where you’re based does matter, and Leeds is a really good place to be right now.
What’s your big ambition for AwarenessAI?
Right now, the big ambition for AwarenessAI is to lead in the niche of AI representation. When you look at the GEO industry, there’s a lot of focus on rankings, and a lot of noise around that. What we’re starting to see is the importance of representation. At AwarenessAI we really focus on representation, because it underpins rankings — and because it’s crucial to understand how an AI describes you. So leading in that niche of AI representation is a big ambition of mine, alongside continuing to educate people about the problem and being the face of generative engine optimisation and AI representation.