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

Where the term comes from

“Generative engine optimization” was popularised by a 2023 research paper of the same name from researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi. They built a benchmark of queries, ran them through a generative search system, and measured how changes to source content — adding statistics, quotations or citations, for instance — affected how visible that source was in the generated response.

Since then the term has been adopted, and stretched, by the marketing industry. In practice it now describes any deliberate work to improve a brand’s presence in AI-generated answers.

How GEO differs from SEO and AEO

The three overlap, but they optimise different things:

	SEO	AEO	GEO
Optimises	Pages	Passages within pages	The brand’s representation across the web
Success looks like	A ranking and a click	A quoted, attributed answer	A mention, citation or recommendation in a generated answer
Main levers	Crawlability, relevance, links	Answer-first structure, clarity	Entity consistency, original information, third-party references

GEO does not replace SEO. AI search products that browse the web — ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Copilot, Google’s AI Overviews — retrieve pages through a search index or crawler before writing an answer. If your pages cannot be crawled or do not rank for anything, they are unlikely to be retrieved.

What GEO can influence

1. Entity clarity

AI answers describe things: companies, products, people, places. If your company name, description, founding facts, products and locations are stated consistently on your website, in structured data and on the third-party profiles you control, there is a clearer picture for any system to draw on. Inconsistencies — an old product name on a directory, two different descriptions on LinkedIn and your homepage — are where errors in AI answers often start.

2. Original information

If your page says the same thing as twenty others, there is no particular reason to cite it. Original data, first-hand experience, specific examples, clear definitions and well-sourced statistics give an answer something to attribute to you. This is also simply what makes content useful to people.

3. Third-party references

Ask an AI assistant for “the best options” in almost any category and look at the sources it cites. They are often review platforms, comparison articles, news coverage, forums and directories — not vendor websites. GEO therefore includes the slow, legitimate work of being present and accurately described on those sources: digital PR, expert contributions, partnerships and complete listings.

What GEO cannot do

• Guarantee inclusion. Nobody outside a platform controls its answers, and those answers vary from one run to the next.
• Replace reputation. If customers and publications don’t talk about you, there is little for an answer to draw on.
• Work through tricks. Hidden instructions for AI crawlers, mass-produced pages and manipulative placements risk search penalties and are increasingly filtered out.

How to measure it

Because answers vary, GEO is measured by sampling: running a fixed set of buyer prompts repeatedly on each platform and recording whether the brand is mentioned, cited or recommended, and how accurately it is described. We explain the method in detail in how to measure AI visibility.

Where to start

1. Write down the twenty questions a buyer asks before choosing a provider like you.
2. Ask them in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, several times each. Note who is mentioned and which sources are cited.
3. Check your own company facts across your site, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and key directories for consistency.
4. Identify one piece of original information you could publish that nobody else has.

If you would like a structured version of this exercise, that is what our AI Visibility Audit does.