Generative engine optimization

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving how often AI engines name your brand and cite your pages when they answer questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and similar tools. The term was introduced in GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, a research paper first posted in 2023 and accepted to KDD 2024. It describes generative engines as systems that retrieve sources and summarize them with large language models.

Why it matters

An AI answer names a few brands and cites a few pages. If your brand is missing, the buyer meets your competitors first. GEO works on what the engines read: your own pages, and the reviews, roundups, forum threads and videos that other sites publish about you. Answer engine optimization covers much of the same work.

What the research found

The paper tested rewrites of source pages on a benchmark of 10,000 queries. Adding citations, quotations from relevant sources and statistics raised a page's visibility in the generated answers by over 40%, and a test on Perplexity showed gains of up to 37%. Keyword stuffing gave little to no improvement. The paper measured how much of each answer drew on a page, which is narrower than whether an answer names your brand.

How it relates to SEO

Google says that optimizing for its generative AI features "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO," with no special files or markup required (Google Search Central). GEO keeps the SEO basics and adds new measures: whether answers name you, beside which competitors, and which pages they cite.

How it's measured

Run a fixed set of buyer prompts on a schedule (prompt tracking) and report AI visibility, the share of runs that name you, with share of voice and the citations each engine shows. A payroll tool named in 8 of 40 runs for "best payroll software for a small agency" has 20% visibility on that prompt, and the next runs show whether a fix moved it. How AI search changes brand marketing lays out a 90-day plan.