MEYERTON, GAUTENG – BurnesSEO, a search and AI marketing studio based in Highbury, Meyerton, has added generative engine optimisation to its monthly retainers, extending its search work into the answers returned by AI assistants rather than the links returned by search engines.
Generative engine optimisation, commonly shortened to GEO, is the practice of structuring a business’s content and data so that AI assistants name it when a customer asks for a recommendation. The service covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity, the assistants the studio’s clients most often report their customers using for local and trade queries.
The launch follows a shift in how consumers find local services. Rather than scanning a page of results, a growing number of buyers describe what they need in a single question and act on the answer. Shopify’s Q1 2026 commerce data recorded AI-referred orders growing nearly 13-fold year over year. A separate Q2 2026 study by Victorious, covering 175 brands across eight AI platforms, found that 89 percent of those brands never appeared in AI answers to category research questions, even though the platforms described 96 percent of them accurately when asked directly.
“The tools know most of these businesses exist. The problem is that they do not recommend them,” said Bibi Burness, founder and director of BurnesSEO. “GEO is the work of closing that gap, and it has to be measured to be managed.”
The studio has published a measured result for a South African client in the pool cover category. In an AI search visibility tracking programme, Designer Pool Covers, a manufacturer and installer with more than 4,500 installations and three branches, holds first place among five tracked brands at 78 percent visibility, with sentiment in AI answers recorded as 100 percent positive across seven AI models.
An engagement begins with a recorded baseline. A fixed set of buyer-style questions is run against each major AI engine, and the responses are captured so that change can be demonstrated rather than claimed. The work that follows covers AI crawler access, structured data, and page content written so that each section answers its core question directly, alongside the review, profile and directory signals these engines draw on.
“The source preferences of these engines change from month to month, so no agency can guarantee a position inside an answer,” said Caitlyn Martin, web designer and digital marketer at BurnesSEO. “Measurement can be guaranteed. Clients receive a monthly record of what each engine says about them and what has changed.”
Generative engine optimisation is delivered within the studio’s monthly retainers rather than sold as a separate service, on the position that AI citation depends on a sound technical and content foundation. Service scope and pricing are published on the studio’s website
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BurnesSEO Study Finds South African Small Businesses Invisible in AI Search Results
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