What is GEO (generative engine optimization)?

GEO targets the answer, not the list of links

A search engine shows ten links and lets the person choose. An AI assistant writes one answer and often names only a handful of brands. If you are not in that short list, the person may never see you at all.

That changes the goal. Instead of asking where a page ranks, GEO asks how often an assistant mentions your business, whether it describes you accurately, and whether it links to your site as a source.

Assistants get their facts from two places

Every assistant draws on what its model learned during training, and many also search the web live before answering. GEO works on both.

• Training data: the large body of web pages, reviews, articles and forums a model learned from. Changes here show up only when new model versions ship.
• Live retrieval: pages an assistant fetches at the moment of the question, usually through a search index. Perplexity, ChatGPT search, Copilot and Google AI Overviews all work this way and show their sources.
• In both cases, what other sites say about you counts as much as what your own site says.

GEO work is mostly clarity, coverage and proof

Most GEO tasks are practical and unglamorous. They make your business easy for a machine to identify and easy to quote.

• State plain facts: what you sell, where, for whom, at what price range.
• Write answer-first passages an assistant can lift in a sentence or two.
• Earn mentions on review sites, directories, lists and publications in your category.
• Allow the AI crawlers that power search answers in your robots.txt file.
• Keep key pages fresh and visibly dated.
• Measure mentions as frequencies over many runs, because answers vary each time.

GEO builds on SEO rather than replacing it

Many assistants pull live results from search indexes, so pages that rank well and load cleanly have a head start. GEO adds a layer on top: entity clarity, quotable facts and third-party proof. Answer engine optimization (AEO), which targets featured snippets and voice answers, overlaps heavily with both.