What is generative engine optimization (GEO)? A practical guide

Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the practice of making your content more likely to be quoted or cited in AI-generated answers, such as those from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Google AI Overviews. Where SEO aims to rank a page in a list of results, GEO aims to have your content used inside the answer itself.

You will also see it called answer engine optimization (AEO) or AI search optimization. They mean largely the same thing.

How is GEO different from SEO?

	SEO	GEO
Goal	Rank in search results	Be cited or quoted in an AI answer
Unit that matters	The page	The passage
Rewards	Relevance, links, page experience	Clear, specific, attributable statements
Measured by	Rankings, impressions, clicks	Citations, mentions, AI referral traffic

The important thing is what they share. AI search tools retrieve pages using search indexes and their own crawlers. A page that cannot be crawled, or that Google has not indexed, is unlikely to be cited anywhere. GEO is a layer on top of sound SEO, not a replacement for it.

How do AI search engines choose what to cite?

Broadly, in two steps. First the system retrieves a set of pages relevant to the question, much as a search engine does. Then the language model reads those pages and writes an answer, citing the passages it drew on.

So there are two hurdles: being retrieved, and being quotable once retrieved. A 2023 study by researchers at Princeton and other institutions, which introduced the term GEO, found that adding statistics, quotations and cited sources to content measurably increased how often it appeared in generative answers.

What actually helps with GEO?

1. Let AI crawlers in. Check your robots.txt. Crawlers such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot need to be allowed. If your site is behind a CDN, check it is not blocking AI bots by default.

2. Answer the question in the first two sentences. Start a section with a direct, self-contained answer, then elaborate. A model lifting a passage needs it to make sense on its own.

3. Use the question as the heading. "How much does X cost?" as an H2, followed by the answer, mirrors how people ask.

4. Be specific. Numbers, timeframes, named tools and concrete steps are quotable. "It depends" is not. Where it does depend, say on what.

5. Use tables and lists for comparisons. Structured content is easier to extract accurately than a long paragraph.

6. Show who is speaking and when. A named author or organisation, a publication date and a "last updated" date all help a system judge whether to trust a page.

7. Add structured data. Schema markup for your organisation, articles, services and FAQs states plainly what a page is.

8. Be mentioned elsewhere. AI systems lean on sources they already trust. Listings in relevant directories, reviews, and mentions in industry publications make your brand more likely to appear.

Does llms.txt help?

llms.txt is a proposed convention: a plain-text file at the root of your site that gives language models a clean summary of what the site contains. It is cheap to add and harmless. It is not a ranking factor, and support among AI providers is uneven, so treat it as a small extra, not a strategy. We publish one on this site because it costs almost nothing.

How do you measure GEO?

It is less mature than SEO measurement, but three things are practical today:

• Ask the questions yourself. Put your ten most important customer questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, monthly, and record who is cited.
• Watch referral traffic. Analytics will show visits arriving from AI tools.
• Track brand mentions. Several SEO tools now report on AI visibility.

What GEO cannot do

Nobody can guarantee a citation, and nobody can pay for one. Anyone selling a guaranteed placement in ChatGPT is selling something that does not exist. What you can control is whether your site is readable, whether your content is the clearest answer available, and whether others vouch for you.

Where should you start?

1. Fix the technical basics. One broken tag can hide an entire site, as we found out on our own.
2. Make sure each thing you sell has its own page.
3. Rewrite the top of each page to answer its main question directly.
4. Add FAQs with complete answers.
5. Get listed where your industry looks.

This is the work our SEO and GEO service covers.