GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
Improving how often generative AI answers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini) cite your site. Visibility is measured, not bought.
GEO is the practice of improving how often, and how favorably, generative AI systems mention or cite your site when they answer a user's question. Where classic SEO targets a ranked list of blue links, GEO targets a synthesized answer that may name a handful of sources — or none at all.
Be honest about how this actually works: you cannot pay an AI engine for a citation, and there is no secret setting that guarantees one. Citations overwhelmingly go to pages the engine can already retrieve, which means being indexed and retrievable is the price of entry. ChatGPT's web search, for example, is powered by Bing, so a site that isn't in Bing's index effectively cannot be cited there no matter how good the content is.
Real GEO work is therefore unglamorous: get indexed on Bing and Google, publish clear and genuinely authoritative pages on the topics you want to be known for, and then measure your citation share across engines over time. Anyone selling guaranteed AI-answer placement is selling something that doesn't exist. You measure GEO; you don't buy it.
Related terms
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) — Structuring content so answer engines can lift a direct answer from it — for featured snippets, voice results and AI answers.
- AI Overviews — Google's AI-generated summary at the top of some results. You can be cited but not paid for placement, and only if you're indexed.
- Indexing — Storing a crawled page in a search engine's index so it can appear in results. Crawled is not the same as indexed.
- llms.txt — A proposed root file curating a site's key content for AI systems. Adoption is limited; it does not replace being indexed.