AI SearchUpdated 9 min read
What is GEO? Generative engine optimization, defined, and how to start
GEO (generative engine optimization) is the work of getting your brand named, and your pages cited, in the answers AI models write: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. The term comes from a 2023 research paper. It builds on SEO rather than replacing it: AI answers quote pages that crawlers can find.
If you meant the other GEO: as a prefix, geo- means earth, as in geography and geology. The rest of this page is about the marketing term.
What does GEO mean in marketing?
In marketing, GEO means making your content the source an AI answer uses. When someone asks ChatGPT "what's the best CRM for a 10-person sales team", the answer names a few brands and links a few pages. GEO is everything you do to be one of them.
Two things count as a win, and they're different:
- A mention: the answer names your brand. This is what a buyer reads.
- A citation: the answer links your page as a source. This is what earns the click, and what tells you which page the model trusted.
You can get one without the other. A model can name you from a "best X" list someone else wrote, and cite a competitor's pricing page in the same answer.
GEO also goes by AEO (answer engine optimization), LLM SEO and AI search optimization. In practice they name the same job, and agencies use whichever their clients recognise.
Where does the term GEO come from?
From a paper called GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, by Pranjal Aggarwal and five co-authors at IIT Delhi, Princeton and elsewhere, first posted in November 2023 and accepted to KDD 2024. They built a benchmark of questions (GEO-bench), rewrote source pages in different ways, and measured how much of each AI answer came from each page.
What they found is more useful than the "up to 40% more visibility" line everyone quotes from it:
| Change made to a page | Visibility score (higher is better) |
|---|---|
| No change | 19.5 |
| Keyword stuffing | 17.8 |
| Added citations to credible sources | 24.9 |
| Added statistics in place of vague claims | 25.9 |
| Added quotations from credible sources | 27.8 |
Keyword stuffing, the oldest SEO trick there is, did slightly worse than leaving the page alone. Adding numbers, quotes and sources did best. The authors saw gains of up to 37% when they tried the same methods on Perplexity.
Read it as a direction, not a recipe. It was a lab setup on 2023-era engines, and the authors say the results varied by topic. What has held up since: models quote pages that state a checkable fact in a sentence they can lift.
How do AI answers pick their sources?
Most AI answers that search the web work the same way. The model rewrites your question into one or more searches, runs them against an index, reads a handful of pages, writes one answer, and links some of what it read.
The index is the part people miss. Each company runs its own:
- ChatGPT reads from OpenAI's search index, built by
OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI's crawler docs say blocking that bot keeps your pages out of ChatGPT's search answers. - Claude uses
Claude-SearchBotfor its search index andClaude-Userto fetch a page when a person asks; Anthropic says blocking them may reduce your visibility in Claude's answers. - Perplexity uses
PerplexityBotto decide what appears in its results. - Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode use Google's own index, and fan your question out into related searches before answering.
So a page can rank first in Google and still be invisible to ChatGPT. We checked that on this very question. On October 11, 2026 we asked the ChatGPT app "what is geo" from the US, with web search on. It listed four meanings (geography, generative engine optimization, geostationary orbit, geolocation) and cited 14 pages. None of the 14 was on Google's first page for the same search that day. ChatGPT cited glossary entries and "what is GEO" pages from small GEO vendors and agencies, plus Wikipedia twice.
That matches a bigger run. Across 30 buyer questions, 2 of the 87 pages ChatGPT cited were in Google's top 10 for the same question; the method and the numbers are in GEO vs SEO. How ChatGPT chooses which of those pages to link is in ChatGPT citations.
How is GEO different from SEO?
SEO is judged by where a page ranks. GEO is judged by whether an answer uses it.
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Where you show up | A list of results in Google or Bing | Inside an answer from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI features |
| What a win looks like | Position 1 to 10, and a click | Your brand named, your page cited |
| Who picks | A ranking algorithm, for the words typed | A model, which runs its own searches and reads a few pages |
| How you check it | Search Console, a rank tracker | Ask the questions on each AI model, on a schedule, and count |
| How stable it is | Moves over days and weeks | The same question can get a different answer on the next run |
The work underneath overlaps a lot: crawlable pages, clear answers, facts other pages don't have, other sites mentioning you. Google says as much in its guide to its generative AI features: no special file, no rewriting for AI, it's still SEO. The full comparison, with the data, is in GEO vs SEO. If your team says AEO, AEO vs SEO covers what to add to a page first.
How do you do GEO?
The full version of these steps, with the data behind each, is in AI search optimization: how to do it, in 8 steps.
Six steps, in the order that pays off.
- Let the AI crawlers in. Check robots.txt for
OAI-SearchBot,Claude-SearchBot,Claude-UserandPerplexityBot. Then check that your prices, tables and key facts are in the HTML: OpenAI's and Anthropic's crawlers download JavaScript but don't run it, per Vercel's crawler data (December 2024). - Write down the questions your buyers ask a model. Not keywords: full questions, the way a buyer types them into ChatGPT. "Best payroll software for a UK startup with contractors", not "payroll software".
- Ask them on each AI model and record what comes back. Which brands are named, in what order, and which pages are cited. Ask more than once: answers change run to run.
- Read the pages that are cited instead of yours. For every question you lose, the cited pages are the work plan: the lists you're missing from, the competitor pages the model trusts, the fact it needed and found elsewhere.
- Publish the page that states the fact. Answer the question in the first sentence of the section. Add the numbers, the dates, a table, a source. That's what the GEO paper rewarded, and it's what pricing, comparison and "X vs Y" pages already do well.
- Get onto the pages AI answers read. "Best X" lists, directories and review sites show up in citations again and again. Getting listed there is old-fashioned outreach, and it counts twice: for links and for answers.
Then keep asking the same questions every week. A change shows up as a trend over weeks, not in tomorrow's answer.
What GEO can't do
It can't guarantee a mention. Nobody controls what a model says tomorrow. Anyone promising "rank #1 in ChatGPT" is guessing with your money.
It won't fix a site that isn't found. If your pages aren't indexed, load slowly or never answer anything plainly, fix that first. It helps both scoreboards.
llms.txt is not a strategy. It's a proposal, not a standard the big assistants have said they follow, and Google's guide says its search doesn't use it. Adding one takes ten minutes. Then spend the afternoon on the pages AI actually quotes.
It's not worth it if your buyers don't ask AI. A local trade where everyone phones for a quote gets more from its Google Business Profile.
How we checked
- Google: the US results page for "what is geo" on October 11, 2026, read through cloro: the top 8 organic results, the AI Overview and its sources, People also ask.
- ChatGPT: the ChatGPT app, US, web search on, "what is geo", the same day, through cloro. One run; ask again and the sources can change.
- Matching: a page counts as on Google's first page if its address matches one of the 8 organic results. None did.
- The paper: read on arXiv on October 11, 2026; the scores in the table are its "position-adjusted word count" for each method, from its Table 1.
- Crawler facts: OpenAI's and Anthropic's own docs, checked September 29, 2026. JavaScript: Vercel, December 2024; crawlers may have changed since.
- Not measured here: Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or AI Mode for this question.
Steps 3 and 4 are the part that's tedious by hand, and the part an AI visibility tool does for you. Picked asks your buyers' questions every day on the AI models in your plan (Claude less often), shows which pages each answer cited, and writes the article for a question you lose. To see where you stand first, run the free AI visibility checker.
Frequently asked questions
What is meant by GEO?
In marketing, GEO means generative engine optimization: getting your brand named and your pages cited in answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. Outside marketing, geo- is a prefix meaning earth (geography, geology), and GEO can also mean a geostationary orbit or geolocation.
What is SEO vs GEO?
SEO gets a page ranked in a search engine's list of results. GEO gets a brand named and a page cited inside an AI-written answer. The work overlaps, but the results differ: in our 30-question run, 2 of 87 pages ChatGPT cited were in Google's top 10. The full comparison is in GEO vs SEO.
What is AEO?
AEO is answer engine optimization. It started with featured snippets and voice assistants, then took on AI answers. Today AEO and GEO describe the same job, getting named and cited in AI answers, and agencies use whichever word their clients know. What AEO adds to SEO is in AEO vs SEO.
How do you do AEO and GEO?
Let the AI crawlers read your site, list the questions buyers ask a model, ask them on each AI model on a schedule, and read the pages that get cited instead of yours. Then publish pages that answer in the first sentence with checkable facts, and get onto the lists and directories those answers cite.
What are four types of SEO?
The usual four are on-page SEO (the content and markup of a page), off-page SEO (links and mentions from other sites), technical SEO (crawling, indexing, speed) and local SEO (maps and business profiles). GEO isn't a fifth so much as a new place to check the results: inside AI answers.
