Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of making your website clear and structured so AI search and answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews can find it, understand it, and surface your business in their answers - by name, as a recommendation, or as a cited source. GEO is another name for answer engine optimization (AEO).
What is GEO?
GEO stands for generative engine optimization. A generative engine is an AI tool that writes you an answer from several sources instead of giving you a list of links, like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.
GEO is the work of making your website clear and structured so those tools can find it, understand it, and surface your business when they answer.
GEO and answer engine optimization (AEO) are two names for the same thing. AEO is the older one. SEO vs AEO vs GEO compares all the names.
Where the name came from
In November 2023, researchers from Princeton University and IIT Delhi posted a paper called GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. It was presented at KDD, a data science conference, in 2024.
It named generative engines, named the practice, and reported that GEO can boost visibility “by up to 40%.”
What the paper tested
A question from their set of 10,000.
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They searched it on Google and took the top five results.What that means Every page in the test already ranked in Google's top five.
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GPT-3.5 read those five pages and wrote an answer. That was the generative engine.What that means Google did the finding. The model summarized what Google ranked.
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One of the five pages was picked at random and rewritten by AI, with quotes, statistics, or cited sources added.What that means The page was rewritten by a machine, not by a business.
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GPT-3.5 wrote the answer again, and they counted how many words came from the rewritten page.What that means Visibility meant words repeated. Not found, not named, not chosen.
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GPT-3.5 also graded the answers.What that means AI wrote the answer, rewrote the page, and graded the result.
Keyword stuffing did worse than changing nothing. On Perplexity, the same rewrites improved visibility “up to 37%.”
For how the paper was tested and where the test falls short, see the review of the 2023 GEO paper.
What that means for you
The paper did not test how a page gets into an AI answer. Every page in the test was already in Google’s top five. It tested how much of each page the AI repeated after the page was rewritten.
The rewrites that helped were quotes, statistics, and cited sources. Is that new?
No. Quotes and statistics were good SEO before anyone said GEO.
What Google’s AI answer says about GEO
Search “what is generative engine optimization” on Google, and the AI Overview, as of September 26, 2026, answers in four parts. A definition, how GEO works, how it differs from SEO, and best practices. Each part lists the sources it came from.
My concern is those sources. They are an online course site, a company that sells a GEO tracking tool, marketing agencies, a business publication, and YouTube videos from marketing companies. Several of them sell GEO.
So how do you know the answer is accurate?
The definition
“The practice of structuring and refining digital content so that AI-powered search and answer engines… can easily find, understand, and cite it.”
This part is close. It says what the work does and what it is for.
Beyond blue links
“GEO aims to make your brand or content part of the actual synthesized answer generated by an AI.”
A lot of words that say very little. It means the AI uses your content in its answer. The definition already said that.
Retrieval and citation
“AI engines use techniques like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to pull specific passages from the web and weave them into a direct response.”
What does that mean for your business? The AI has to find your page, and trust it enough to quote it or use it. RAG is the technical name for the finding. Knowing the name changes nothing about the work.
Query fan-out
“Generative engines often break a single user question into multiple smaller sub-queries.”
This part is accurate. Google describes query fan-out in its own guidance. It is why your pages have to answer the questions around the one asked, as How AEO works explains.
SEO focus and GEO focus
SEO, it says, focuses on “keywords, backlinks, technical site performance, and user behavior metrics.” GEO focuses on “factual clarity, conversational structure, credible citations, statistics, and authoritative brand presence across the web.”
SEO has not been about keywords and backlinks for years. Clarity, credible sources, and a business described the same way across the web are part of SEO as it is done now.
The best practices
It lists four, each from a different source.
Write conversationally. “Use a natural, human voice that answers complete questions, much like an FAQ or a detailed how-to guide.” The source is a YouTube video from a marketing company. Is it accurate? Not necessarily. What gets a page used is a clear, complete answer. Conversational is a style.
Add credibility signals. Statistics, expert quotes, and citations, “which academic studies show can significantly boost AI citation rates.” The academic studies are one paper, the 2023 paper that named GEO. It measured pages that were already in Google’s top five.
Use structured data. The source is a YouTube video from a marketing agency. Google’s own guidance says “there’s also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add” for AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Build off-site presence. Reviews, media mentions, and directory listings, “because AI models look across the broader web.” This one holds. Credibility does not come only from your website. It is also not new.
So is the answer accurate? Parts of it. The parts that hold describe work SEO already does. The parts that do not hold come from marketing videos and an online course site.
Google’s own guide to its AI features ranks in that search too. It says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and the best practices for SEO still apply.
What GEO work involves
Every page in the paper’s test was already in Google’s top five. The work starts before that.
- Rank for the questions your customers ask. A page can only be a source in Google’s AI Overviews or AI Mode if it is indexed and eligible to show in Google Search.
- Answer the questions around it. One question to Google’s AI can become several related searches. Google calls it query fan-out. Give each related question its own page, and link the pages to each other.
- Put the answer first. The answer in the opening lines, in words someone could quote. Then the detail.
- Back it up. Statistics, quotes, and the sources you used. This is the part of the paper that holds.
- Describe your business the same way everywhere. Your website, your Google Business Profile, directories, and review sites. Answer engines read all of it.
- Ask the answer engines yourself. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google the questions your customers ask. Read what they say about your business, and fix what is wrong at the source.
Can you control what AI says about your business?
No. You can control what it writes from.
An AI answer is written from the pages it finds. Your website, your Google Business Profile, directories, review sites, and articles about your business. If they are clear, current, and agree with each other, the answer has something accurate to work from. If they are outdated or contradict each other, the answer can be wrong too.
When an answer is wrong about your business, fix the source.
How do you measure GEO?
It is harder to measure than SEO.
- Answers change. You and I can ask the same question and get different answers, with different sources. Ask again tomorrow and it can change again. There is no position one to track, and no accurate way to count how often your business shows up.
- Google counts AI Overviews with everything else. In Search Console, clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are reported with regular search results.
- Many people never click. Some read your name in the answer and search for your business by name later.
Some things can be measured.
- Whether your pages are found. Search Console shows which pages are indexed and which searches they show up for. If your pages are not found, there is nothing for an AI to use.
- Visits from AI assistants. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others show up as referral traffic in Google Analytics.
- Searches for your business by name. Search Console shows these too.
- What the answers say. Ask the questions your customers ask, and read what comes back.
Tracking tools do that asking at scale. They run a set of questions through AI tools and record whether your business shows up. The questions are the ones picked for the tool, not the ones your customers asked. And the answers change from person to person.
Is that accurate enough to base decisions on? I am not convinced any of them are.
Should you do GEO?
Yes. GEO is another name for optimizing your website for AI. A growing number of your customers get their answers from AI, in Google and in AI assistants like ChatGPT. If your business is not in those answers, you lose those customers to the businesses that are.
GEO, AEO, and optimizing for AI are names for the same work, and that work is part of the same work as SEO. Should you optimize your website for AI? covers why, and what it takes to appear.
The search: should you do GEO
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“Yes, you should do generative engine optimization (GEO) because AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews now answer user questions directly before anyone clicks a traditional search link.”
PartlyThe yes holds. The reason describes what changed for the person searching, not what it means for your business. The rest of the answer treats GEO as a practice of its own, separate from SEO.
AI answers change from person to person and from one search to the next.
Frequently asked questions
What does GEO stand for?
Generative engine optimization. It is the work of making your website clear and structured so AI search and answer engines can find it, understand it, and surface your business in their answers.
Is GEO the same as AEO?
Yes. GEO and AEO are two names for the same thing. AEO is the older name.
Is GEO the same as SEO?
They are part of the same work. AI answers use pages that already rank in search, and Google says the same SEO best practices apply to its AI features.
Where does the term GEO come from?
A paper posted in November 2023 by researchers from Princeton University and IIT Delhi, presented at the KDD conference in 2024.
Does GEO increase visibility by 40%?
That number comes from the paper. It measured how many words from a page already in Google’s top five showed up in an answer written by GPT-3.5, after the page was rewritten by AI. It did not measure how a business gets found.
Sources
- [2311.09735] GEO: Generative Engine Optimization arxiv.org
- AI Features and Your Website developers.google.com
- Do people click on links in Google AI summaries? pewresearch.org
When you want to rank on top of Google and show up in AI answers, this is the work.
SEO + AI Search Optimization
