What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?
GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the practice of improving how often and how accurately generative AI systems cite or mention your content in the answers they write. The term comes from a 2023 research paper.
How is GEO different from AEO?
AEO focuses on being the direct answer to a question. GEO focuses on being a source that a generative system reads, trusts and cites while it composes a longer answer. In practice the work overlaps heavily, and Google treats both as part of SEO for its Search features.
What affects whether you get cited?
- Proven Your page must be crawlable, indexed and useful. Without that, nothing else matters.
- Proven Systems such as Google’s use query fan-out, splitting a question into related searches, so covering a topic’s subtopics gives more ways to be retrieved.
- Practice Original information, clear definitions and named sources make a page easier to cite correctly.
- Practice Consistent naming of your brand, authors and products across the web helps systems recognize them as the same entity.
- Experimental Fixed formulas, such as a required number of statistics per page, have no confirmed basis from platforms.
Can you control what AI companies do with your content?
Partly. robots.txt controls crawling by named bots. Each company publishes separate crawlers for training and for search. See should you block AI crawlers?