What Is GEO? Generative Engine Optimization Explained

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the work of making your business easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini to find, understand and recommend. It does for AI answers what SEO does for search results.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of improving how often, and how favourably, AI assistants mention and cite your business in their answers.

• GEO aims at the answer an assistant writes, not at a list of ten links.
• Step one is access: the AI crawlers must be allowed to read your site.
• Step two is clarity: say what you do, where and for whom in plain, quotable sentences.
• Step three is proof: structured data, reviews and listings on sites buyers already use.
• Then measure it: ask the questions your customers ask and record who gets named.

Where does the term GEO come from?

The term comes from a 2023 research paper, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization", by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues, later published at KDD 2024. The authors report that GEO methods "can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses" in their experiments (arXiv). That result comes from the authors' own benchmark, not from live ChatGPT results, so read it as evidence that how content is written matters, not as a promise for your site.

You will also see AEO (answer engine optimization) and similar labels. They overlap heavily with GEO. Our glossary defines them side by side.

How is GEO different from SEO?

The overlap is real. Google states that to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, "a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet", and that there are "no additional technical requirements" (Google). Good SEO foundations still matter. What is new is the set of AI crawlers, and the habit of buyers asking an assistant instead of scrolling results.

Why does GEO matter for a small business?

Many buyers now ask an assistant "what is the best dentist in Kraków?" and read the short list it writes. If you are not on that list, that buyer may never open your website. Small businesses are exposed because they rarely have an SEO team to notice it. Enterprises can monitor this with specialist platforms; a clinic, a law firm or a car dealer usually cannot, which is why we built simple free tools to start with.

What decides whether an assistant recommends you?

Nobody outside the engines knows the exact recipe, and none of them publishes one. What is documented is access and eligibility:

• OpenAI says its OAI-SearchBot is "used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features", and that robots.txt controls it (OpenAI).
• Perplexity says PerplexityBot is designed to "surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity" (Perplexity).
• Anthropic says Claude-SearchBot "navigates the web to improve search result quality for users" (Anthropic).

If an engine's search crawler cannot read your pages, you cannot be cited from them. Beyond access, what follows is our working approach, not a published rule: clear answers near the top of the page, structured data that states who you are, consistent business details, and mentions on the review and directory sites that buyers in your market already use.

How do you get started with GEO?

1. Check access. Run the AI crawler checker to see which AI crawlers your robots.txt lets in.
2. Describe your business for machines. Create an llms.txt with the llms.txt generator and read what llms.txt is and is not.
3. Audit the basics. The AI-readiness audit checks structured data, contact details, headings and more.
4. Answer buyer questions on your site. Write short FAQ answers whose first sentence is the answer.
5. Be where buyers look. Complete your profiles on the directories and review sites of your market and ask for reviews.
6. Measure. Run the free AI Visibility Check to see which businesses assistants name for your market.

How do you measure GEO?

Ask each assistant the questions your customers ask, in their language, and record who is named, in what order and which sources are cited. Answers can differ from one run to the next, so a single snapshot misleads; track the average over many questions and repeat weekly. That is how our Visibility Score works: 50% how often you are mentioned, 25% your position, 15% citations of your own site and 10% sentiment. The AI Visibility Index explains the method and will publish anonymized benchmarks once enough businesses are tracked.