What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?

The term comes from a 2023 research paper by researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi, published at KDD 2024. They called systems that search the web and then write an answer "generative engines", and showed that the way a page is written changes how often, and how prominently, those engines use it. The name stuck, and GEO now covers everything a brand does to show up in AI answers.

You will also see AEO (answer engine optimization), LLMO (large language model optimization), AI SEO and AI search optimization. They describe the same goal with different emphasis. See GEO vs SEO and answer engine optimization for how they overlap.

When someone asks ChatGPT "what's the best press release service for a startup?", one of two things happens:

1. The model answers from memory. It draws on what it learned in training: text from across the web, books and licensed data, up to a cutoff date. Brands that were written about often, on many sites, before that cutoff are the ones it knows.
2. The model searches first. For questions about products, prices, recent events or anything time-sensitive, assistants increasingly run web searches, read a handful of pages, and write an answer with citations. This is called retrieval or grounding, and it is where most of the citations you see come from.

GEO works on both. For the first, your brand needs a broad footprint of mentions across the web, so future training data contains it. For the second, your pages, and pages about you, need to be found by the engine's search step and be easy to quote. Read how AI assistants choose their sources for the details per engine.

The GEO paper tested changes to page text across thousands of queries. Adding citations to credible sources, quotations and statistics gave the largest gains, improving a page's visibility in generated answers by up to 40% in the authors' benchmark. Keyword stuffing, the old SEO trick, did not help. Beyond page text, practitioners consistently see the same levers:

• Third-party mentions. AI answers about "the best X" lean heavily on list articles, reviews, forums and news. Being named on those pages matters more than anything on your own site. See brand mentions vs backlinks.
• Pages that answer one question clearly. A heading that matches the question, a direct answer in the first sentences, then detail. See how to write content AI assistants cite.
• Being crawlable by AI search bots. Blocking OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Claude-SearchBot removes you from those engines' search results. See AI crawlers and robots.txt.
• Consistent facts. The same name, description, founders, pricing and category on your site, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, directories and press. Engines trust facts they see repeated. See entity SEO.
• Ranking in classic search. ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews all draw on search indexes. Pages that rank well are the pages that get retrieved.

An established brand has years of reviews, articles and forum threads about it. A new startup has its own website and little else, so when an assistant searches for its category, there is nothing about it to find. The fastest fixes are the ones that put your brand's name and facts on many independent, indexed pages at once:

• a press release distributed to news sites, which creates dozens to hundreds of indexed pages naming your brand, your category and your claims;
• listings on startup and software directories and comparison sites such as AlternativeTo and SaaSHub, which AI assistants read when asked for alternatives;
• a clear, factual site with an about page, pricing, and pages that answer the questions buyers ask.

Then track what changes: check what AI assistants say about your brand before and after, with the same prompts. Our 30-day plan for a new brand puts this in order.

There is no Search Console for ChatGPT. Measuring AI visibility today means three things:

See how to track AI traffic in Google Analytics for the setup, and AI visibility tools if you want the prompt checks automated.