What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?

RushilFounder, Ru Visibility2 October 2026

Short answer

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of making your business easy for AI answer tools, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, to find, understand and cite. The term comes from a research paper first published in November 2023 and accepted at the KDD 2024 conference.

Where the name comes from

“Generative” refers to AI tools that write an answer instead of showing a list of links. In GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, Pranjal Aggarwal and five co-authors described it as “the first novel paradigm to aid content creators in improving their content visibility in generative engine responses”. Their tests found that GEO “can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses”, and that what works “varies across domains” (the paper on arXiv).

What the work involves

Access: letting the crawlers AI tools use read your site, instead of turning them away by accident.
Clarity: pages that say plainly what you do, for whom and where, with short answers to the questions people ask.
Consistency: the same business details on your site, your Google Business Profile and directories.
Evidence: facts, figures, sources and outside mentions that make you worth citing.

How it relates to SEO

SEO helps you rank in a list; GEO helps you get mentioned in an answer. They share a foundation: Google says “the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search” (Google Search Central). The longer version is in our article SEO vs GEO: How Search Is Changing for Businesses.

Other names for the same thing

You will also see AEO (answer engine optimization), LLMO (large language model optimization) and “AI SEO”. They overlap almost entirely; agencies use whichever name their clients search for. Our plain-English table says which are genuinely different and which are new labels for the same work.

Sources

Find out what AI says about you.

Send us your web address. We run our own tool on it, free, and send you what it says. The whole thing — not a taster with the useful bits taken out.

Whether AI can even read your site

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google and Bing all send a small program to read your pages. We knock on your door as each one and see who gets let in. If they are being turned away, nothing else matters until that is fixed.

Two scores out of 100 — one for Google, one for AI

Plus what is behind each number. Where we could only make a fair guess, we say so instead of dressing it up as a measurement.

A list of fixes, best one first

Ordered by what gives you the most for the least work, so the top of the list is the quickest win. It is yours either way — use it with us or without us.

We ran it on our own site too. It told us what we were getting wrong, and we published that. A tool you will not point at yourself is not worth much.

One thing the free check does not do: actually ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for businesses like yours, dozens of times, and count how often your name comes up. That costs us real money each time we run it, so it comes with paid work.