GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the set of practices aimed at getting a brand mentioned, and cited as a source, in the answers of AI search engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode.
You will also see it called AI SEO or AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). Different labels, same goal: when someone asks an AI about a product or service like yours, your brand is in the answer.
Where the term GEO comes from
The term was popularised by the academic paper GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (Aggarwal et al., 2023) by researchers from Princeton and other institutions. The authors built a benchmark of thousands of queries and measured how a source's visibility in generated answers changed when its content was modified. According to the paper's abstract, some techniques, such as adding citations to sources, quotations from experts and statistics, boosted visibility by up to 40% in their experiments, with results varying by topic.
Read it for what it is: a controlled experiment, not a recipe for ChatGPT in production. The useful takeaway is the underlying idea: concrete, verifiable content is more likely to end up in an answer.
GEO vs SEO vs AEO
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where you compete | Organic search results | Featured snippets and voice assistants | Answers written by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews or AI Mode |
| What success looks like | Rankings, clicks and traffic | Being the direct answer | Being mentioned, recommended and cited |
| Main metric | Rankings and organic traffic | Snippets won | Mention rate and share of voice in answers |
| What it depends on | Mostly your own site | Your own site | Your site and what other sites say about you |
GEO does not replace SEO; it builds on it. AI search engines with web access run searches before writing (often several at once, known as query fan-out) and build the answer from what they find. If your pages do not rank for those queries, you are less likely to be cited. That is why Google keeps saying the usual best practices are what it takes to appear in its AI features, as we explain in our Google SGE entry.
Mention vs citation
- Mention: the AI names your brand in the text of the answer, for example in a list of recommended providers.
- Citation: the AI links to one of your URLs as a source.
The two can happen independently. An AI may cite your guide as a source while recommending your competitors, or name you without linking because it took the information from a third-party comparison. For buying questions, the mention is what sways the decision; the citation is what brings visits. Track both.
What gets your brand mentioned by AI
Being in the sources AI cites
Run your buyer questions and note which URLs the answers cite. They tend to be best-provider roundups, industry directories, media outlets, forums and review sites. If your brand is not in them, the AI has little to name you from. Earning a place there is PR and link building work.
Pages that answer buyer questions
Prices or price ranges, comparisons with alternatives, who it is for and who it is not for, timelines, terms. With concrete figures and no fluff. A service page that only says you are the market leader gives the AI nothing to cite. Think about the search intent of someone about to choose.
Letting AI bots crawl your site
Make sure your robots.txt, security plugin or CDN firewall is not blocking OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Anthropic's crawlers. An llms.txt file is no substitute for that access, and no AI search engine has confirmed using it for its answers.
Consistent brand mentions
Get your brand named on other sites, even without a link, and always associated with the same things: same name, same category, same services. If every source describes you differently, the AI cannot tell what to recommend you for.
How to measure GEO
- Define 20 to 50 buyer questions that do not include your brand: best X agencies in London, alternatives to Y, how much does Z cost.
- Run them across several engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews or AI Mode.
- Repeat them: the same question gets different answers from one run to the next. Run each one several times and measure again every week or month.
- Calculate your mention rate: answers you appear in / total answers × 100. Example: 40 questions × 4 engines × 3 runs is 480 answers; if you appear in 96, your mention rate is 20%.
- Record your position in lists: first is not the same as fifth.
- Benchmark against competitors with share of voice: your mentions divided by the total mentions of you and your competitors.
The AI visibility checker asks these questions for you and shows which answers you appear in and in what position. The GEO audit adds what your site makes easy or hard for AI and sums it up in a score from 0 to 100.
Common mistakes
- Drawing conclusions from a single question asked once.
- Measuring with questions that already include your brand: you will always show up.
- Creating a page for every variation of a question. It does not work and Google may treat it as spam.
- Chasing formatting tricks or special files instead of working on content and sources.
- Ignoring technical SEO: if you cannot be crawled and indexed, you cannot be cited.
If you want a team that measures this every week to work on it with you, that is what our GEO and AI SEO service does.
Frequently Asked Questions
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GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization: the work of getting a brand mentioned and cited in the answers of AI search engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. It builds on SEO, because those systems search the web before answering, and adds measuring the answers and earning presence on the sources AI relies on.
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The terms are used almost interchangeably. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) grew up around featured snippets and voice assistants, where the goal was to be the single direct answer. GEO refers to generative engines, which write their own answer from several sources and usually name several brands. In practice, the techniques overlap almost completely.
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No. ChatGPT search, Perplexity and AI Overviews look at search results before writing, so a page that does not rank for the related queries is less likely to be cited. GEO extends SEO: it measures which answers you appear in and works on your presence on the third-party sites AI uses as sources.
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Ask the questions a buyer in your market would ask, without naming your brand, across several engines and several times, because answers change from one run to the next. Count the share of answers you appear in, your position in the list and how often your competitors show up.