There is a line in your Google Analytics that most Kenyan business owners have never looked at.
It is in the referral traffic report. And on a growing number of the client accounts I manage, it says chatgpt.com.
Not Google. Not Facebook. Not a travel blog that linked to you three years ago. ChatGPT. Someone asked an AI assistant a question, the AI mentioned a business, the person clicked, and they landed on a website.
That traffic is small right now compared to Google. But it is growing, it converts unusually well, and almost nobody in this market is doing anything deliberate to increase it. Which is exactly the kind of gap I find interesting.
I run Nairobi Marketing, a digital marketing agency in Nairobi. We do SEO, Google Ads, and generative engine optimization for businesses across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, with most of our work in travel, hospitality, and professional services. I am writing this because I keep having the same conversation with business owners who have no idea this is happening, and I would rather explain it once properly than in fragments on twenty different calls.
What is Generative Engine Optimization?
Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, is the work you do to get your business mentioned when someone asks an AI assistant a question related to what you offer.
That is it. That is the whole definition.
When someone types “which safari company should I use for a Serengeti trip” into ChatGPT, the model produces an answer that names specific companies. Those companies did not pay for that placement. There is no ad auction. There is no bidding. They appear because the model has enough information about them, from enough credible sources, structured in a way it can actually use, to feel confident recommending them by name.
GEO is the practice of making sure that information exists and is findable.
You will also see this called AEO, which stands for Answer Engine Optimization, and LLMO, for Large Language Model Optimization. People argue about the distinctions. I do not find the argument useful. The work overlaps by about ninety percent regardless of which term you use.
Try It Yourself Before You Read Any Further
Open ChatGPT right now and ask it to recommend businesses in your category in your market.
If you run a tour company, ask it which safari companies in Tanzania it would recommend for a first-time visitor. If you run a hotel in Diani, ask for the best beach hotels on Kenya’s south coast. If you run a law firm, ask which Nairobi firms handle commercial property.
Then do the same thing in Gemini and Perplexity.
Two things will happen. Either your business appears, in which case you should find out why so you can protect that position. Or it does not, in which case your competitors are being recommended to your customers and you are not in the conversation at all.
Most Kenyan businesses that run this test for the first time discover the second thing. I have watched several business owners go quiet on a call after doing it.
Why This Matters More for Some Businesses Than Others
Not every business needs to care about this equally. If you run a hardware shop in Nakuru serving walk-in customers from three neighbourhoods, GEO is not where your attention should be. Get your Google Business Profile right and move on.
But if your customers are researching before they buy, comparing options, spending significant money, and often located somewhere else entirely, then this is already affecting your business whether you have noticed or not.
Safari and tour companies are the clearest example in East Africa. A traveller in Munich planning a Serengeti trip has never been to Tanzania. They do not know which operators are reputable. They are spending several thousand dollars with a company they have never met, in a country they have never visited. That is exactly the kind of high-uncertainty, high-value research decision people are increasingly handing to an AI assistant.
The same applies to hotels selling to international guests, law firms handling cross-border transactions, real estate developers selling to diaspora buyers, and any professional service where the client vets you before making contact.
If that is you, and you have not thought about how AI systems describe your business, that is a gap worth closing.
What Actually Moves the Needle
Here is where most articles on this topic get vague. I will try not to.
Your entity has to be clear and consistent. AI systems need to know who you are with confidence before they will recommend you. That means your business name, location, and services are stated the same way everywhere they appear. Your schema markup tells search engines and AI crawlers exactly what your organisation is. Your Google Business Profile is complete and matches your website. Your founder or key people have a connected presence that reinforces the business. If an AI system cannot confidently establish who you are, it will not put your name in an answer.
Depth beats breadth, badly. This is the part that connects directly to how good SEO already works. A safari company with genuinely detailed content about the specific things they know, migration timing in particular regions of the Serengeti, why certain camps suit certain travellers, what the roads are actually like in April, signals real expertise. A company with a homepage saying “we offer world-class safari experiences” signals nothing. AI systems are unusually good at telling the difference.
I wrote about this in the context of SEO pricing and it applies here even more strongly. The specific, locally informed content that mainstream travel media has not covered is what builds topical authority. And topical authority is what makes an AI system confident enough to name you.
Structure your content so it can be extracted. Answer the question in the first sentence, then explain. Use headings that match how people actually ask things. Write FAQ sections where each answer stands alone and makes sense pulled out of context, because that is exactly what will happen to it. This is not a trick. It is just writing clearly, which is what you should be doing anyway.
Get mentioned by sources the model trusts. AI systems learn about your business partly from what other people say about it. A mention in a travel publication, a citation in an article, a review on a platform with credibility. This is digital PR viewed through a new lens. The coverage you earn this year is training the systems that will answer questions next year.
The Honest Part
A lot of what is being sold as GEO in this market right now is repackaged SEO fundamentals with a new label and a higher invoice attached.
I am not going to pretend otherwise, because you will figure it out eventually and then you will not trust anything else I have written.
The overlap is genuinely large. Good technical health, strong topical depth, clean structured data, credible third-party mentions. If you have been doing SEO properly, you have already built most of the foundation.
What is actually new is narrower. It is knowing which parts of that foundation AI systems weight most heavily, which is not the same as what Google’s ranking algorithm weights. It is structuring content for extraction rather than just for ranking. It is monitoring whether you are being cited at all, which almost nobody is doing. And it is understanding that the goal has shifted from ranking a page to being named as an entity, which changes what you build and in what order.
That narrower thing is real and it does require deliberate work. But anyone telling you GEO is a completely separate discipline requiring a completely separate budget is selling you something.
Where Kenya Actually Sits Right Now
We are early. Very early.
Most Kenyan businesses have not run the test in the section above. Most agencies here are not offering this. The market has not caught up, which means the businesses that build AI search visibility over the next twelve months will be extremely difficult to displace once it does.
That is not a sales pitch. It is just how these windows work. The same thing happened with SEO in Kenya around 2015. The businesses that took it seriously while everyone else was still buying newspaper ads still hold those positions today.
The difference is that this window is narrower, because AI adoption is moving considerably faster than search adoption did.
So run the test. Ask ChatGPT to recommend a business in your category. See whose name comes up.
Then decide whether you are comfortable with the answer.
If the Answer is No
At Nairobi Marketing we do this work for tour operators, safari companies, hotels, and professional services firms across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. It usually starts with an AI visibility audit, which is just us running the queries your customers would actually type, across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and showing you exactly where you appear, where your competitors appear, and why.
From there the work is entity establishment, schema markup, topical depth in the areas where you have genuine expertise, and earning the kind of third-party mentions AI systems treat as credible. Some of that is SEO you should have been doing anyway. Some of it is specific to how these systems work. We will tell you which is which rather than billing you for both under a new name.
If you want to know where your business currently stands, that is a conversation worth having. And if you would rather run the audit yourself using what is in this article, do that instead. The information is the same either way.
