What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?

Generative engine optimization (GEO), explained

The term comes from a 2023 research paper, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" by Aggarwal and colleagues, accepted to KDD 2024. They built a 10,000-query benchmark and tested nine ways of rewriting a page on its 1,000-query test split.

Adding citations, quotations or statistics raised a page's share of the generated answer by roughly 30 to 40% on their main measure, position-adjusted word count. Keyword stuffing gave little to no improvement. When every source in an answer was optimized at once, lower-ranked pages gained most: citing sources raised the fifth-ranked page's visibility by 115.1% and lowered the top-ranked page's by 30.3% on average. These are lab results on a metric the authors defined, not traffic, and they varied by topic.

SEO competes for a position in a list; GEO competes to be a source in a generated answer. It sits on top of SEO: generative engines retrieve pages first, then write the answer from them. OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot surfaces sites in ChatGPT's search features and that opted-out sites won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers; Perplexity says PerplexityBot does the same for its results. Google says a page is eligible to be a supporting link in AI Overviews and AI Mode if it is indexed, can be shown with a snippet and isn't excluded in Search Console. If search crawlers can't reach your page, you're unlikely to be cited.

Google's May 2026 guide treats the label as ordinary SEO: optimizing for generative AI search "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO". For Google Search, it says, you can ignore llms.txt files, chunking, rewriting content just for AI and chasing inauthentic mentions. Google also says that writing a separate page for every query variation to manipulate AI responses is scaled content abuse.

In practice, what seems to help is mostly ordinary good work, made easy to quote: a plain answer near the top of each section, specific facts with sources, original data others can't copy, and a consistent, honest description of your product on your site and in directories. Google asks for non-commodity content: a point of view or first-hand detail that a summary can't supply.

Answers vary between runs, users and models, so measure over time. Search Console's Generative AI performance report shows impressions by page in AI Overviews and AI Mode; for other assistants, track a fixed set of prompts and count mentions and citations.

Why it matters for founders

Google says people are "increasingly gravitating to generative AI experiences" to find information. If an assistant doesn't name your product, you miss buyers who never reach a results page. Most of the work is the work that makes you rank, and the paper suggests pages that start lower in results have the most to gain.

Example

A comparison page says "Tool A is a great choice for small teams." The rewrite says "Tool A's free plan covers three users and 1,000 exports a month (checked on its pricing page, October 2026)." The second version is specific and sourced, and an assistant can quote it with a link back.

Common mistakes

• Treating GEO as a separate discipline and neglecting basic SEO.
• Blocking AI search crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot while wanting to be cited by AI search. Our AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt.
• Adding made-up statistics because the paper said statistics help.
• Paying for GEO tools or services that promise to rank you in ChatGPT, or that claim to use Google's internal data.
• Writing a page for every prompt variation instead of one strong page per question.
• Measuring from one-off manual prompts instead of a tracked prompt set.