Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Definition

Origin: the 2023 GEO research paper

The name comes from a research paper, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues, first published in November 2023 and presented at KDD 2024. The authors tested how changes to a page's content affected its visibility in answers from generative search engines, and found that methods such as citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics could raise visibility by up to 40% in their benchmark.

Marketers adopted the term quickly. You will also see AI search optimization, LLM SEO and answer engine optimization (AEO) used for overlapping work.

How GEO works

AI assistants that search the web retrieve a handful of pages, then write an answer from them. GEO improves your odds at each step:

1. Be retrievable. The search agents AI tools use to fetch pages are allowed in robots.txt (OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User for ChatGPT, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User for Claude, PerplexityBot for Perplexity), your pages are indexed by Google and Bing, and important content is in the HTML rather than hidden behind scripts. Training crawlers such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot are a separate decision about model training.
2. Be describable. Your name, category, audience, features and price are stated plainly and consistently, with tables, definitions and FAQs a model can lift.
3. Be cited by others. Comparison articles, reviews, Reddit threads, GitHub and directories that mention you give AI engines independent sources to draw on. This is usually the biggest lever, and the slowest.

Where GEO sits next to SEO

GEO is built on SEO, not a replacement for it: Google says pages need no special optimization to appear in AI Overviews, only to be indexed and eligible for a snippet. Progress is usually tracked as the share of a fixed set of buyer prompts whose AI answers mention you, which is what GEO tools and trackers automate. For the full comparison with SEO and a measurement plan, read what GEO is and how it differs from SEO.

Illustrative examples

Hypothetical scenarios that show how the term applies. They are not reports of real cases.

• A project management SaaS appears in an AI answer to "best project tool for small agencies" because two comparison articles and a Reddit thread that mention it are among the cited sources.
• A developer tool adds a pricing table and a short FAQ to its pricing page, and AI answers start quoting its plans correctly instead of guessing.
• A startup finds an old wildcard rule in its robots.txt was blocking OAI-SearchBot, removes it, and ChatGPT search can fetch and cite its pages again.