Search for "cat food malaysia" on Google today and the page often opens with an AI Overview: a written answer that names the stores Google trusts before a single traditional result appears. One of the names it cites is Petico, an online pet store we work with. When the answer sits above position one, fewer people click position one.
That shift is why Malaysian traffic reports look strange this year. Google says AI Overviews now run in more than 200 countries and territories, Malaysia included, and ChatGPT has become the first stop for product research for a growing slice of buyers. So impressions hold steady while clicks slide, and at the same time customers arrive saying an AI recommended you. The result page is turning from a list of links into a single answer, and brands now compete to be named inside that answer rather than listed under it.
This article covers what generative engine optimisation (GEO) actually involves, how the AI engines pick their sources, what changes from classic SEO, what stays the same and where a Malaysian SME should start.
What generative engine optimisation actually is
GEO is the work of getting your brand named and cited inside AI-generated answers: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot. The term comes from a 2023 research paper by academics at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute and IIT Delhi, who tested which page changes made content more visible in AI answers. Adding statistics, quotations and clear source citations raised a page's visibility in generative responses by up to 40% in their benchmark, while classic keyword stuffing did almost nothing.
The measurement changes too. Classic SEO asks where you rank for a keyword. GEO asks how often the answer names you when a buyer asks about your category. You can rank fourth for "water filter malaysia" and still be the only brand the AI Overview mentions, and the reverse is also true, which is exactly the gap most Malaysian brands have never checked.
One thing GEO does not do is replace SEO. Every engine on that list reads the same web that Googlebot crawls, so our GEO work is built on top of the same foundations, and the next two sections explain why.
How AI Overviews and ChatGPT choose their sources
AI Overviews work in two steps: retrieve, then write. Google runs your query plus a fan of related queries against its normal index, pulls a set of candidate pages, then has a language model compose the answer and link the passages it drew from. Candidates come overwhelmingly from pages that already rank well. That gives a page two filters to pass. It has to rank well enough to be retrieved, and it has to contain a passage clean enough for the model to lift.
ChatGPT builds its picture of your brand from two places. The first is training data: years of accumulated mentions across the open web, which is why brands with a long trail of reviews, press and forum discussion get recommended even with browsing switched off. The second is live browsing, where it retrieves from a web index much the way Google does and favours pages that answer the question directly. Across both, consensus matters. A claim that exists only on your own website carries less weight than one echoed on marketplaces, in local media and in community threads.
The common thread is that these engines quote passages rather than pages. A 3,000 word category page with no clear answer in it gives the model nothing to lift.
What changes when the answer replaces the list
Four things move up the priority order, and none of them mattered much in 2019.
Entities over keywords. The engines resolve names into entities: a brand, its products, its locations, its founder. If your company is "Aman Water Solutions" on the website, "Aman Water Filter" on Shopee and "AWS Enterprise Sdn Bhd" on Google Business Profile, the machine cannot confidently connect the three, and it will cite a competitor it can. Use one name everywhere, keep your Google Business Profile complete and write an about page that states plainly what you sell, where you operate and since when.
Liftable answers. Structure pages so a question heading is followed by a direct 40 to 60 word answer, then the detail. If the buyer asks "does pet food attract SST in Malaysia", the answer belongs in the first two sentences under that heading, in the words a customer would use, in the language they actually search in, whether that is English or Bahasa Malaysia. This is the single highest-return writing habit for GEO because it hands the model a ready-made quote.
Schema markup. Product, Organization, FAQPage and LocalBusiness markup restate your facts in a format machines can verify: prices, availability, opening hours, service areas. Schema will not rescue thin content, but it removes ambiguity from good content, and ambiguity is what stops a cautious model from naming you.
Citations and third-party mentions. Because the engines cross-check claims, your presence on marketplaces, in Malaysian media, on review platforms and in community threads on Lowyat, Reddit and Facebook groups now feeds directly into whether you get named. You cannot script those mentions, but you can earn them, and a brand with zero footprint outside its own domain is asking one source to out-vote the whole web.
What stays the same
More than the panic suggests. Technical health still decides everything downstream: if Googlebot cannot crawl a page, no AI built on Google's index can cite it. Site speed, clean indexation and sensible architecture remain the base of the stack. Authority still compounds the old way, through links, coverage and content that other people reference. And rankings still matter, because AI Overviews draw their candidates overwhelmingly from pages that already perform in classic search.
That is why we treat GEO as an extension of our SEO work, not a separate product with its own invoice. The engines changed how the answer is presented. They did not change which sites they trust.
What twelve months of groundwork did for Petico
Petico came to us as an online pet store competing against marketplaces and established chains for the most contested pet keywords in the country. Over twelve months of combined SEO and content work, their average tracked keyword position moved from 30 to inside the top 10, and 35 category keywords now sit mostly in the top 3.
Then something we never explicitly built for happened. Google's AI Overviews began citing Petico by name for queries like "cat food malaysia" and "pet toys malaysia", placing the brand inside the answer that appears before any traditional listing. There was no separate GEO campaign and no trick. The citations followed the rankings, the entity consistency and a library of category content that answered real buyer questions directly.
That order of events is the honest version of GEO in Malaysia right now. The brands getting named by AI engines are the ones whose search foundations were already sound, and the fastest route into the answers is to build those foundations with the answer format in mind from day one.
Where a Malaysian SME should start
Budgets are finite, so here is the priority order we would run for a typical Malaysian SME, top to bottom.
- Fix the technical base. Crawl the site, resolve indexation errors, get load times respectable on mobile. Nothing else on this list works on a site the bots cannot read.
- Lock your entity signals. One brand name everywhere, a complete Google Business Profile and an about page that states what you sell, where you deliver and how long you have operated.
- Rewrite your money pages with liftable answers. Every key category and service page should answer its core question in the first 40 to 60 words, then earn the rest of the scroll.
- Add FAQ sections in your buyer's words. Cover the questions Malaysians actually ask: delivery to Sabah and Sarawak, SST treatment, halal certification where relevant, warranty coverage, cash on delivery. Write them the way customers phrase them.
- Mark it up with schema. Product, Organization, FAQPage and LocalBusiness as a minimum, validated so the engines can confirm your facts.
- Earn third-party mentions. Marketplace presence, local media coverage, review platforms and community threads all feed the consensus the engines check against.
- Track the answers monthly. Search your ten most valuable queries, note whether an AI Overview appears and who it cites, and ask ChatGPT who it recommends in your category. What gets measured gets fixed.
Steps one to five are within reach of a capable in-house marketer. Steps six and seven are where most SMEs stall, because they need sustained content and outreach rather than one-off fixes.
Frequently asked questions
Is classic SEO dead in Malaysia now that AI answers exist?
No. AI Overviews build their answers mostly from pages that already rank, and ChatGPT's browsing reads the same web Google crawls, so a site that cannot rank cannot get cited. Ranking used to be the finish line, and now it is the qualifying round for a place inside the answer.
What is the difference between GEO and AI search optimisation?
There is no meaningful difference. GEO, AI search optimisation, answer engine optimisation and LLM optimisation all describe the same work: making a brand visible and citable inside AI-generated answers. GEO comes from the 2023 research paper that first measured the effect, and it has become the most common label in Malaysia and elsewhere.
How long does it take before AI engines cite a brand by name?
Think in months, not weeks. Petico reached named citations in Google AI Overviews after twelve months of combined SEO and content work, and ChatGPT's picture of a brand moves even more slowly because part of it is fixed at training time. Anyone promising AI citations in 30 days is selling you something else.
Can we do GEO without touching our current SEO?
No, and an agency that sells them as separate retainers is splitting one job into two invoices. The layers depend on each other: technical health feeds rankings, rankings feed retrieval and answer-shaped content converts retrieval into citations. Run them as one programme with one team accountable for both numbers.
The practical takeaway is that the brands winning AI search in Malaysia are running one connected programme, and the window where this is still a differentiator will not stay open long. If you want to know whether the engines already cite you, talk to us and we will check your category. More breakdowns like this live on our insights page.
Sources: Google, "AI Overviews expand to over 200 countries and territories" (blog.google, May 2025); Aggarwal et al., "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" (arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735, 2023). Petico figures are from our own rank tracking and AI Overview monitoring.