GEO
What is GEO, and how do you get named in AI answers?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) means shaping your pages so that AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews can find them, make sense of them and cite them. It stands on the same base as SEO, pages that can be crawled and indexed, and adds content written so a model can lift a clear, sourced answer straight from it.
Written by Hatice Kölmük7 min read
Where does the term GEO come from?
The name comes from a research paper. The label is borrowed from academia: “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” first appeared as a preprint in November 2023, written by researchers at Princeton, IIT Delhi and partner institutions, and KDD 2024 later took it into its program. They described a new kind of search engine, one that reads several sources and writes a single answer, and asked how a website could become more visible inside that answer.
To test their ideas they built GEO-bench, a set of 10,000 queries from many fields, and rewrote source pages in nine different ways. Some of the changes lifted a page’s visibility in AI-written answers by as much as 40 percent. Others made no difference at all, which is just as useful to know.
Where does GEO differ from SEO?
SEO fights for a place in a list of links. GEO competes for a mention inside a paragraph the machine writes. The reader may see your company name, a short summary of what you said and a small link, or only your name with no link. Either way, the first job is the same as in SEO: the assistant has to be able to reach your page and read it.
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| What you aim for | A high position in the results list | A mention or citation in the written answer |
| Where people see you | Search results pages | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode |
| What a win looks like | A click to your site | Your name and your claim in the answer, often with a link |
| How you measure it | Rankings, impressions, clicks | How often buyer questions mention or cite you, and the clicks that follow |
| The shared base | Crawlable, indexed, fast and helpful pages | The same pages, written so a passage can be quoted on its own |
We compare the two side by side, with data on clicks, in SEO vs GEO: what changes when AI answers first.
What did the GEO research find works?
The three strongest methods in the paper were plain editorial habits: citing sources, adding quotations from credible people and adding statistics in place of vague claims. On the paper’s main measure, these lifted visibility by 30 to 40 percent. Keyword stuffing, one of the oldest SEO tricks, gave little or no gain.
- Cite sources: link to the study, regulation or documentation behind each claim.
- Add numbers: replace “many customers” with the figure, and say where the figure comes from.
- Quote people who know: an engineer, a regulator or a named expert, quoted accurately and in context.
- Write clearly: fluent, easy wording also helped, most of all when it was combined with statistics.
One result matters for smaller companies. When every source page in the test was optimized at once, lower-ranked pages gained the most. Citing sources lifted the page in fifth place of the normal results by 115 percent, while the page in first place lost visibility on average. In an answer engine, a careful page from a small site can beat a bigger one.
A caution
The paper tested its methods on a research engine and on Perplexity. The assistants keep changing their models, so treat the paper’s figures as a direction rather than a guarantee.
Can AI assistants read your site at all?
Before any writing, check the plumbing. Every assistant fetches pages with its own crawler, and one line in robots.txt, a CDN setting or a firewall rule can lock it out without anyone in the company noticing.
- Google: Overviews and AI Mode have no index of their own; they read from the one behind the regular blue links. Google’s guidance keeps the bar low: be in the index and be allowed to show a snippet. Nothing else is asked of you, no new tags and no extra files.
- ChatGPT: OpenAI’s search features use a crawler called OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI says that sites which block it drop out of ChatGPT’s search answers. Training is a separate question, handled by a different bot, GPTBot, with its own line in robots.txt.
- Perplexity: PerplexityBot finds and links the sites that appear in Perplexity’s answers; the company says it does not use it to train foundation models.
Many sites block all of these at once by copying a ready-made “block AI” rule. Decide bot by bot instead: you can refuse the crawlers that collect training data and still allow the ones that cite you in answers.
How do you write pages that AI assistants cite?
Assistants quote passages, not whole pages. A paragraph that settles one question by itself within its first two sentences is easy for a model to quote. A paragraph that spends three sentences warming up is not. Most of GEO writing is editing existing pages with that in mind.
- Put the answer first. Start every section with a direct answer to the question in its heading, then explain.
- Use question headings. Write them the way people ask: “How long does it take?”, “What does it cost?”
- Back every claim. Link the source, name the date, give the number.
- Say who is talking. Sign articles with a real name and role, and keep an About page that matches what other sites say about you.
- Keep facts consistent. Prices, locations, services and company facts should read the same on your site, your profiles and directories, because assistants compare sources before they repeat a claim.
- Keep pages current. Update them when facts change and show the date of the last update.
An AI answer is a summary of what the web agrees on about you. GEO starts by making sure the web says the right thing, in plain words, in more than one place.
Do you need llms.txt or special schema for GEO?
Not for Google. Google’s help pages leave no doubt here: appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode takes no new machine-readable file, no AI text file and no extra schema.org type. Structured data still helps search engines understand a page in general, so keep the markup that describes your company, your products and your articles accurate.
The llms.txt file is a community proposal: a short text file that points models to a site’s key pages. It costs little to publish, but Google says such files aren’t needed for its AI features, so treat it as optional and finish the basics first.
How do you measure GEO?
There is no rank position inside an answer, so measurement works by sampling. Pick the questions your buyers ask, run them in each assistant on a schedule and record three things: whether you are mentioned, whether you are linked and what is said about you. Answers change from one run to the next, so judge the share over many runs, never a single screenshot.
Clicks still count. Google reports traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode inside the normal Search Console Performance report, and visits from ChatGPT or Perplexity often show up as referral traffic in your analytics. We run this kind of tracking as a monthly service, described on our AI visibility tracking page.
How should a company begin with GEO?
- Collect the 20 to 50 questions a buyer of yours asks before choosing a supplier.
- Ask them in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google, and note who gets named.
- Check robots.txt, your CDN and your firewall for the crawlers listed above.
- Rework the pages that ought to answer them: the answer up top, with sources, a date and an author.
- Make your company facts match across your site, your profiles and directories.
- Ask the same set again every month and look at what moved.
If you would rather hand this over, our AI SEO and GEO service does the work above, and the SEO and GEO page explains how we run classic search and AI answers as one plan.
Written by Hatice Kölmük
Partner at yop, Tallinn. Who we are
Sources
Where we can help
The services behind this post.
AI SEO / GEO
Your name in the answers ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity give.
SEO and GEO
SEO and GEO services from yop: rank on Google and get named in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answers, with one plan, one report and one team.
AI visibility tracking
How often AI assistants name you, measured every month.
Your project
Want this done for your company?
Send your site and what you want to change. We reply within two working days with the first thing we would do.
Questions
Asked about GEO.
Does GEO make SEO obsolete?
No. GEO rests on SEO: Google’s AI features cite only pages that are indexed and can show a snippet, and the other assistants search the web in much the same way before answering. GEO adds a layer on top, aimed at being quoted inside the answer.
When does GEO start to show results?
Fixing access problems can help as soon as crawlers come back, which Google says can take from several days to several months. Content and reputation work builds over months, because assistants reflect what many sources say about you.
Does GEO work for small businesses?
Often better than classic SEO. In the GEO paper, lower-ranked pages gained the most from citing their sources, because an answer engine weighs what a page says more than how large the site behind it is.
How does GEO compare with AEO?
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is an older name for writing content that answers questions directly, for featured snippets and voice assistants. GEO keeps those habits and adds the work that is specific to AI assistants: their crawlers, their citations and tracking the questions people ask them.
