What is GEO (generative engine optimization)?

Generative engine optimization (GEO), spelt generative engine optimisation in Australia and the UK, is the work of getting your business named, cited and described accurately in the answers that AI tools write, including ChatGPT search, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Microsoft Copilot. Classic SEO earns a page a position in a list of links, while GEO aims to get your business mentioned inside the one answer a buyer actually reads. This guide covers where the term came from, how the tools pick sources, how GEO fits with SEO, what the research shows works, and where a small business should start.

It is written for business owners and marketers who want a plain explanation before they spend time or money. Everything here about how the tools work comes from what Google, OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic and Microsoft publish about their own systems, the robots.txt standard, and the research paper that coined the phrase.

What is generative engine optimisation?

The term comes from a research paper titled GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues, a team that included researchers from Princeton University. It was first posted to arXiv on 16 November 2023 and accepted to the KDD 2024 conference. The paper defined a generative engine as a system that retrieves relevant documents, then uses a large language model to write one response grounded on them, with attribution so the reader can check the sources. It named Bing Chat, Google's Search Generative Experience and Perplexity as examples.

You will see the phrase spelt both ways, and some people call it generative SEO. They all mean the same thing. In practice, GEO aims for three outcomes:

• Cited. One of your pages is linked as a source under the answer.
• Mentioned. Your business is named in the answer, with or without a link.
• Recommended. You are one of the businesses suggested when someone asks who to hire or buy from.

How generative engines build an answer

The common pattern is retrieve, then write: the engine runs one or more searches, reads a small set of pages and composes a reply, usually with links to the pages it used. Each company publishes something about its own process.

Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google says both may use a technique it calls query fan-out: issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources to build the response, and identifying supporting pages to show as links. AI Overviews only appear when Google's systems decide they add something beyond the classic results, so they often do not show at all. AI Mode began rolling out in the US in May 2025, when Google said people were asking more complex, longer questions.

ChatGPT search. OpenAI introduced ChatGPT search on 31 October 2024. ChatGPT decides whether to search the web based on what you ask, and its replies include links to the sources it used. Since 5 February 2025 it has been available to everyone in regions where ChatGPT operates, with no signup required.

Gemini. Google says Gemini Apps can ground their answers in content from the Google Search index. A robots.txt token called Google-Extended controls whether your content may be used for that grounding and for training future Gemini models. It does not affect whether your site appears in Google Search.

Perplexity and Claude. Perplexity and Anthropic each run a dedicated search crawler, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot, to find pages for their answers. Copilot is covered in the measurement section below, because Microsoft now reports AI citations to site owners.

Two kinds of crawler sit behind these tools, and the difference matters when you get to robots.txt:

• Search crawlers index pages so they can be cited in answers: Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot.
• Training crawlers collect content for building future models: GPTBot and ClaudeBot, with Google-Extended as the control for Gemini. Each vendor lets you set these separately from its search crawler.

Why GEO matters for your business

When a buyer asks an assistant who to hire or what to buy, they get a short written answer naming a few businesses rather than ten links to compare. If you are not one of the names, that buyer may never find out you exist.

Two signals show how seriously the search companies take this. Google said in May 2025 that in its biggest markets, including the US and India, AI Overviews was driving more than a 10% increase in Google usage for the types of queries that show them. In February 2026 Microsoft added an AI Performance report to Bing Webmaster Tools and described it as an early step toward generative engine optimisation tooling.

Our own numbers point the same way. In Mojo Dojo's State of B2B AI Visibility 2026 audit of 719 B2B companies, the average AI Visibility Score was 50 out of 100, and only 11% scored 70 or above. On our own website, 35% of 240,060 bot visits over 30 days came from AI crawlers. Most businesses are not being named yet, so the field is still open.

GEO vs SEO vs AEO: how they fit together

• SEO earns a page a position in a list of search results.
• AEO (answer engine optimisation) gets one of your pages quoted as the answer to a specific question.
• GEO gets your business named and recommended when someone asks an assistant for options.

They share more than they differ. Google says you can apply the same foundational SEO best practices to AI Overviews and AI Mode as to Search overall: a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet, and there are no additional technical requirements. Specific optimisation is not required, but the SEO fundamentals remain worthwhile.

What changes is the shape of the question, the weight given to outside evidence, and the scoreboard.

• Questions. Longer and more personal: 'an accountant for a small building company who understands payroll tax' rather than 'accountant'.
• Authority. SEO leans on links to your site. GEO also depends on what independent sources say about you: reviews, press, directories, original research and named experts.
• Measurement. SEO reports rankings and clicks. GEO reports how often you are named, how accurately you are described and your share of voice against competitors.

GEO does not replace SEO. Google's AI features draw on the normal Google index, so a page that cannot be indexed cannot be a supporting link. If you are new to all of this, our guide to AI SEO covers the wider picture, and the AEO Playbook covers the page-level side, getting your pages quoted as the answer. GEO sits on top of both.

What the research says actually works

The GEO paper is the best public evidence on what moves visibility in AI answers. The authors built a benchmark of 10,000 queries, called GEO-bench, and tested changes to source pages to see which made them more visible in the generated answers. Visibility was scored mainly by a measure the paper calls position-adjusted word count: roughly, how much of the answer draws on your page and how prominently that material appears.

• Citations, quotations and statistics helped most. Adding citations to credible sources, quotations or statistics gave a 30 to 40% relative improvement on the main visibility measure, and 15 to 30% on a subjective impression measure.
• Keyword stuffing did not help. It gave little or no improvement, and on Perplexity it performed 10% worse than leaving the page alone.
• Lower-ranked pages gained most. Adding citations lifted visibility by 115.1% for pages ranked fifth in the search results, while the top-ranked page lost 30.3% on average.
• Results varied by engine and topic. On Perplexity, adding quotations was the strongest method at 22% over the baseline, and which method worked best varied by domain.

Two caveats. These are results on a research benchmark and on Perplexity as it worked in 2023 and 2024, not measurements of ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews today, and every engine keeps changing how it chooses sources. Microsoft's advice for being cited in Copilot points the same way: clear headings, tables and FAQ sections, claims backed by examples, data and cited sources, and content kept fresh.

How to start with GEO: a beginner's checklist

None of these steps needs new technology, and most of them also help your ordinary search results.

1. Check what the assistants say about you now. Write down the questions a buyer would ask before choosing a business like yours, in the long conversational form they would actually type, then ask them in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot and record who is named and how you are described. This is your baseline.
2. Let the search crawlers in. Confirm in robots.txt that Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot are allowed, then check your firewall, CDN and hosting settings, which can block a crawler silently. Google asks that crawling is allowed in robots.txt and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure, and Perplexity publishes firewall allow rules for its bots. In Google Search Console, open Settings and check that Search generative AI is set to include your site; excluding it removes your links from AI Overviews and AI Mode.
3. Write pages that answer real questions. Put a direct answer at the top of each key section, then the detail: specific facts, numbers with a source an assistant can check, and named experts with a real role. Keep important content as text rather than in images or PDFs. Google's E-E-A-T guidance (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) says trust is the most important of the four.
4. Use one description of your business everywhere. Services, locations, prices and who you serve should match across your website, Google Business Profile, directories and social profiles. Google asks site owners to keep Merchant Center and Business Profile information up to date for its AI features.
5. Earn mentions on the sites the engines read. Reviews on the platforms your customers use, press and industry coverage, directory listings and expert commentary all back up what your own site says. An engine choosing a few names to recommend is likely to prefer the ones other sources already vouch for.
6. Use structured data to confirm facts you already show. Google describes structured data as a standardised format that gives explicit clues about the meaning of a page. It helps machines read facts you publish, but Google says the markup must match the visible text and lists no special markup as a requirement for its AI features.

Content, crawler access, consistent business facts and earned mentions, with a baseline at the start and tracking each month, is the whole job. It is what a generative engine optimisation services programme runs as one piece of work, and the first four steps can be done in-house.

Common GEO mistakes

• Keyword stuffing. The GEO paper found it gave little or no gain and made pages less visible on Perplexity.
• Blocking a search crawler by accident. A firewall setting, a hosting provider's bot protection or a copied robots.txt template can turn away OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Claude-SearchBot without the owner knowing. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.
• Treating robots.txt as security. RFC 9309, the standard that defines it, states that its rules are not a form of access authorisation.
• Vague claims and hidden facts. 'Quality service at a fair price' gives an assistant nothing to repeat. Google asks for important content to be available in text form, and has explained why most business documents are better off as web pages than as PDFs.
• Set and forget. Assistants change how they pick sources, so without a regular check you will not notice when you drop out of an answer.

How to measure GEO

There are no rankings to check, so measurement looks different. Only 9% of the B2B companies in our audit measure AI referrals today, and another 42% can see AI traffic in their analytics but cannot separate it from the rest. Here is what can be measured now, as of October 2026.

Prompt tracking. Run the same fixed set of buyer questions across the assistants every month and record whether you are named, whether you are recommended or just mentioned, how you are described and which sources the answer used. Over time that gives you share of voice against the competitors who appear.

Google Search Console. Search Console counts AI Overviews and AI Mode in the overall Performance report under Web, and since mid-2026 it also has a separate generative AI performance report showing impressions from those features by page, country, device and date. It does not yet show clicks from AI results. Google has moved inline links higher in AI Mode and AI Overviews, but Search Console still does not show which clicks come from AI results.

Google Analytics 4. Analytics has a default AI Assistant channel for visitors arriving from sources like ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Copilot or Grok; clicks from Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode are excluded and count as Organic Search. Check the tagging before you react to a dip: in October 2026 a ChatGPT referral drop in GA4 turned out largely to be a missing tracking tag, with those visits landing in Direct.

Bing Webmaster Tools. The AI Performance report, in public preview since February 2026, shows total citations, average cited pages per day, the grounding queries the AI used, and citation counts per page, across Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and some partner integrations.

Click quality. Google says clicks from results pages with AI Overviews are higher quality, meaning visitors are more likely to spend more time on the site. For a service business the number that matters is enquiries, so tie your AI referral channel to form submissions and calls.

Frequently asked questions

Is GEO the same as AEO?

No, but they overlap. AEO gets one of your pages quoted as the answer to a question, and GEO gets your business named when someone asks for options. The pages that get quoted also shape what an assistant believes about you, so most businesses run both together.

Does GEO replace SEO?

No. Google says the same SEO fundamentals continue to apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode, and a page has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet before it can be a supporting link. Weak SEO holds GEO back.

Do I need special code or files for AI Overviews?

No. Google says there are no additional technical requirements beyond being indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. Structured data can help machines read facts you already show, and Google says it must match the visible text.

Should I block AI bots?

Decide search and training separately. Allowing OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot is what each company says keeps a site visible in its answers. GPTBot and ClaudeBot can be blocked on their own to opt out of training, and Google-Extended covers Gemini training and grounding with no effect on Google Search.

Can anyone guarantee a mention in ChatGPT?

No. Each assistant chooses its own sources and changes how it does so, and none publishes a formula for who gets named. What can be done is to remove the reasons you are left out, then measure month by month what changed.

How long does GEO take?

No engine promises a timeline. OpenAI says a robots.txt change takes about 24 hours to be reflected in ChatGPT search, Google says recrawling a page can take anywhere from several days to several months, and earning reviews and mentions on independent sites takes longer than either.

What to do next

Start with the baseline: ask the major assistants your buyers' questions this week and note who they name. Then check robots.txt and your firewall for the search crawlers, rewrite your most important page to answer its question in the first two sentences, and put one accurate description of your business on every profile. For the fuller method, including how the engines decide which businesses to name, read our free 12-page GEO Playbook.