What is generative engine optimisation (GEO)?

Where does the term GEO come from?

It was coined in a 2023 paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, by researchers from Princeton University and IIT Delhi. It was later accepted at KDD 2024, one of the main data science conferences.

The authors built a benchmark of search queries, tried different ways of rewriting web content, and measured how visible each source became in AI-generated answers. They reported that adding citations, quotations from relevant sources and statistics could raise a source's visibility by up to 40%. Keyword stuffing, the oldest SEO trick, did not help.

How do AI tools decide which brands to name?

There are two routes into an AI answer:

• Training. The model learned about your brand from text on the web before its training cut-off. Brands mentioned often and consistently, on sites that matter, are more likely to be recalled.
• Live search. The tool searches the web, reads a handful of pages and summarises them, usually with links to its sources. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Copilot all work this way when they search.

You can't edit a model's training data. You can control whether your pages are found, read and quoted when the tool searches, and you can earn the mentions that shape what the next model learns.

How is GEO different from SEO?

The foundations overlap: pages machines can read, clear content, real authority. Three things are different:

• Success is a mention, not a position. There is no page two. You're named or you aren't.
• Answers vary. Ask the same question twice and you can get different brands. You track the share of answers you appear in, not one rank.
• Other sites speak for you. AI answers lean heavily on reviews, lists, forums and articles about you, not only on your own site.

For a side-by-side view, read SEO vs AEO vs GEO.

How do you optimise for generative engines?

1. Let AI search crawlers in. Check robots.txt and your firewall for OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Bingbot. A crawler that's blocked can't cite you.
2. Put your content in the HTML. Many AI crawlers read the raw page and don't run JavaScript. If your text only appears after a script runs, they may see an empty page.
3. Write pages worth quoting. Define terms plainly. Make specific claims. Cite your sources. Put the answer near the top.
4. Be clear about who you are. Use the same name, description and details everywhere, add Organization structured data, and link your official profiles.
5. Earn mentions where AI looks. Industry publications, review sites, directories, comparison articles, Reddit and YouTube. If the pages AI tools cite for your category mention competitors and not you, that's the gap to close.
6. Track it. Ask each AI tool the same set of buyer questions every month and record who gets named. Here's how to set that up.

Does GEO replace SEO?

No. AI tools with web search depend on search indexes to find pages, and Google's AI features are built on Google's own index. Weak SEO usually means weak GEO.

Treat GEO as SEO carried into AI answers, and measure it separately. That's how we run generative engine optimisation.

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