GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
Improving how often AI assistants mention and cite your site in their answers.
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making content more likely to be used, mentioned and cited by generative AI answers, such as those from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. The term comes from a 2023 research paper by researchers at Princeton and IIT Delhi, published at KDD 2024.
That paper reported that some content changes, such as adding citations, quotations and statistics, raised a source's visibility in generative answers by up to 40% in its benchmark. Beyond the page itself, GEO also covers being present on the reviews, directories and lists that AI answers draw on.
Key characteristics
- Aims for mentions and citations in AI-written answers.
- Favours clear claims, statistics, quotations and named sources.
- Depends on being crawlable by AI search crawlers.
- Extends beyond your site to the third-party sources AI answers read.
Example
A SaaS company adds dated, sourced statistics and a plain comparison table to its pricing page, and gets listed in two industry directories, so assistants answering "best tools for X" start naming it.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the term GEO come from?
From the paper "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" by Aggarwal and colleagues, first posted on arXiv in November 2023 and published at KDD 2024.
Does GEO replace SEO?
No. AI answers still lean on pages that search engines can crawl and trust, so GEO builds on SEO rather than replacing it.