What Is Generative Engine Optimization and How Does It Work
Amit Malvi
Founder, SearchAxe. Former Senior SEO Manager, Invideo AI
Published Updated 12 min read
Quick answer
What is generative engine optimization? It's the practice of getting your product named, recommended and cited in answers written by AI engines. Those engines search an index, pull passages from the pages they find and write one reply with links. GEO makes your pages, and the third-party pages that mention you, easy to retrieve, easy to quote and consistent, so the answer includes you and describes you correctly.
On this page
- What is generative engine optimization in plain terms?
- How do generative engines build an answer?
- What signals do generative engines reward?
- How does GEO overlap with SEO?
- What does generative engine optimization work include?
- How long does generative engine optimization take?
- GEO cannot guarantee a place in any answer
- Which GEO terms should a founder know?
Key takeaways
- Generative engine optimization is the work of getting your product named, recommended and cited in AI-written answers, not ranked on a results page.
- Engines search an index, keep self-contained passages and write a reply, so crawler access and answer-first sections come before anything else.
- In the 2023 GEO paper, adding quotations, statistics and cited sources raised visibility by up to 40%, while keyword stuffing did little.
- Brand mentions on other sites correlated far more strongly with Google AI Overviews visibility than backlinks in Ahrefs' 75,000-brand study.
- Answers that search the web can change after a recrawl, answers from training data wait for a new model, and no one can guarantee a citation.
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of getting your product named, recommended and cited when buyers ask AI engines a question. If you're a founder or growth lead at a seed to Series B AI startup and your board has asked whether you're "doing GEO", the short version is that it builds on the SEO you already do, with pages rewritten so engines can quote them and mentions on the sites engines already trust.
What is generative engine optimization in plain terms?
Generative engine optimization is to AI answers what SEO is to results pages. A search engine returns a list of links and lets the buyer choose. A generative engine reads sources for the buyer and writes one reply, naming a few products and linking a few pages. GEO is everything you do so that reply includes you, describes you correctly and links to pages you control or trust.
The term comes from a research paper. GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, first posted in November 2023 by researchers from Princeton and IIT Delhi and published at KDD 2024, built a benchmark of 10,000 queries and tested how nine kinds of content change affected a source's visibility in generated answers.
The label has since moved from academia into the platforms. Microsoft described its February 2026 AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools as "an early step toward Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) tooling", and Search Engine Journal reported later that month that Bing had added GEO to its Webmaster Guidelines, noting that GEO no more guarantees a citation than SEO guarantees a ranking. Google takes the opposite line on naming. Its guide to optimizing for generative AI features says optimizing for generative AI search "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."
How do generative engines build an answer?
Most generative engines answer in three moves: they search, they pick passages, and they write. The system turns the buyer's prompt into one or more searches, retrieves pages from an index, keeps the passages that answer each part of the question and composes a reply with citations. The pattern is called retrieval-augmented generation, after a 2020 paper by Patrick Lewis and colleagues that paired a language model with a searchable index.
From a buyer's prompt to a cited answer
- The prompt is expandedGoogle's AI features documentation says its AI features may use a "query fan-out" technique, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics. A page can be retrieved for a sub-question it was never written to rank for.
- Pages are retrieved from an indexGoogle's AI features search Google's index. ChatGPT search and Copilot draw on Bing's index. Perplexity and Claude also run their own search crawlers, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot. A page that is blocked or missing from the index an engine uses never reaches the next step.
- Passages are selectedMicrosoft's guide to inclusion in AI search answers says pages are broken into smaller sections and that these "modular pieces are what get ranked and assembled into answers." One clear paragraph can win on its own.
- The answer is written and sourcedThe model writes the reply and links the pages its passages came from. Whether it names your product depends on what those passages, and the model's training data, say about you.
There is a second, slower route into answers: training data. When an engine answers without searching, it relies on text it learned before its training cutoff, and that only changes when a new model ships. That's why we report answers that search the web separately from answers that don't. The engine-by-engine detail is in how AI search engines decide which sources to cite.
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Schedule a Free ConsultationWhat signals do generative engines reward?
Generative engines reward pages they can reach, passages that answer cleanly, specific facts and a brand other sites already talk about. No engine publishes a formula for citations, so the evidence comes from their documentation and from independent studies. The table pairs each signal with its strongest source.
| Signal | Evidence | What it means for a startup |
|---|---|---|
| Crawlable and indexed | Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot are not shown in ChatGPT search answers | Check robots.txt, firewall rules and indexing in Google and Bing before writing anything |
| Self-contained passages | Microsoft says pages are split into pieces that are ranked and assembled into answers | Open each section with the answer, then add detail |
| Quotations, statistics and cited sources | In the GEO paper, adding cited sources, quotations or statistics improved visibility by 30 to 40% on its position-adjusted word count metric, with quotations best at 41% | Put named, sourced numbers on the pages where buyers decide |
| Brand mentions across the web | In Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands, branded web mentions correlated 0.664 with Google AI Overviews visibility, backlinks 0.218 | Reviews, roundups and community threads count, not only your own site |
| Original, non-commodity content | Google's generative AI guide asks for unique, non-commodity content with its own viewpoint | Publish what only you know, such as product data, benchmarks and real use cases |
Two findings matter most for a young AI startup. In the GEO paper, citing sources lifted visibility by 115.1% for the source ranked fifth in search results, while the source ranked first fell 30.3% under the same change, so a smaller site can gain ground on an established one. And in Ahrefs' May 2025 study of 75,000 brands, about 26% of brands had no Google AI Overviews mentions at all. A brand nobody writes about is hard for an engine to recommend.
What the engines don't reward is just as clear. Keyword stuffing offered little to no improvement in the paper, and Bing's updated guidelines, as Search Engine Journal reported, now treat artificially engineered language written to trigger AI citations as abuse, and say large-scale content generated without oversight or editorial review may be excluded from indexing.
How does GEO overlap with SEO?
GEO and SEO share most of their foundation, because generative engines find sources through search. Google says the best practices for SEO "continue to be relevant" because its generative AI features rely on its core ranking systems, and the same crawlable, indexed, clearly written page serves Google and Bing results and AI answers.
The overlap is not total. Ahrefs found in March 2026 that 37.9% of URLs cited in Google AI Overviews also appeared in the first 10 results for the same query, down from about 76% in its July 2025 study, and 31.0% ranked outside the top 100. Ranking helps you get retrieved; it no longer decides who gets cited. The full side-by-side comparison is in GEO vs SEO, and the naming question is untangled in AEO vs GEO.
What does generative engine optimization work include?
GEO work produces a short list of concrete things: a prompt set and baseline, access fixes, rewritten pages, earned third-party mentions, consistent entity details and a monthly report. If a provider can't say which pages and which outside sources will change, you're buying a dashboard.
- A prompt set and baseline. The questions buyers ask before they shortlist, such as best tool for a use case, alternatives to a competitor and pricing comparisons, run on every engine, with who gets named and which pages get cited.
- Access and indexing fixes. Search crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot allowed, and key pages indexed in Google and Bing.
- Pages rewritten to be quoted. Product, comparison, alternatives and use-case pages that say what the product does, and for whom, in the first lines.
- Third-party mentions. A place on the roundups, review sites and community threads that answers in your category already cite.
- Entity consistency. One description of your product, category and pricing model, repeated across your site, schema, profiles and listings.
- Tracking against the baseline. The same prompts rerun each month, plus the AI reports Google and Microsoft now provide.
Two things often sold as GEO do little on their own. One is an llms.txt file, a September 2024 proposal by Jeremy Howard; Google says you don't need AI text files or special markup to appear in its AI features, and we weigh the evidence in does llms.txt help your site get cited. The other is a citation dashboard with nobody changing pages. The workstreams are set out in more detail on the GEO agency page, and the GEO agency comparison covers what to ask any provider.
How long does generative engine optimization take?
Answers that search the web can change soon after a rewritten page is recrawled and re-indexed. Answers built from training data change only when a new model ships, which nobody controls. We have not seen reliable independent data on typical GEO timelines, so treat any promised date with caution.
Off-site mentions are the slow part, because reviews, roundups and threads are earned rather than published. Measure against a baseline: prompt-level tracking on every engine, plus Google's Search Console generative AI performance reports, announced on June 3, 2026 and rolled out to all sites on August 31, 2026, which show impressions in Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. Bing's AI Performance report adds citations and the grounding queries behind them. Turning that into one number is covered in share of voice in AI search, and budgets in how much GEO costs.
GEO cannot guarantee a place in any answer
No one can promise a citation in a specific answer, and Bing's guidelines now say as much. Answers vary between runs of the same prompt. In SparkToro research reported by Search Engine Journal in January 2026, 12 brand-recommendation prompts were run 60 to 100 times each on ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI Overviews, 2,961 runs in all, and ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews returned the same brand list less than 1% of the time. Engines also change models, and the sources they trust shift with what gets published. GEO raises your odds across many prompts, so judge it on that, not on one screenshot.
GEO is also the wrong spend for some companies. A pre-launch product with no product page, no users and no reviews gives an engine nothing to cite; ship the page and earn the first reviews first. And if your buyers never ask AI engines for recommendations, for example because they buy through a fixed procurement list, test that with real prompts before paying for GEO.
Which GEO terms should a founder know?
These are the terms you'll hear in GEO pitches and reports. Several definitions follow Profound's AI search glossary, published in August 2026, which treats GEO, AEO and LLMO as names for the same discipline.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Generative engine optimization (GEO) | Making your brand easy for AI engines to retrieve, quote and recommend |
| Answer engine optimization (AEO) | A label that grew out of featured snippet and voice work, now used for the same AI answers |
| LLMO or LLM SEO | Another name for the same work that names the technology, large language models |
| AI SEO | An umbrella term used both for optimizing for AI search and for using AI tools to do SEO |
| AI visibility | How often and how accurately AI engines mention, recommend and cite you for your buyers' prompts |
| Mention | Your brand name appears in an answer |
| Citation | A link to a specific page shown as a source for an answer |
| Share of voice | Your share of brand mentions across a tracked prompt set, compared with competitors |
| Query fan-out | One prompt expanded into several background searches before the answer is written |
| Grounding | Tying an answer to retrieved, current sources rather than the model's memory |
| Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) | The architecture where a model fetches documents and writes its answer from them |
| AI crawler | A bot that fetches pages for an AI company, for search (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot) or for training (GPTBot, ClaudeBot) |
| llms.txt | A proposed file listing a site's key pages for AI agents, which Google says its AI features don't need |
AEO has its own explainer in what is answer engine optimization, including how answer engines pick the passage they quote.
Frequently asked questions
Is generative engine optimization the same as SEO?
No, but they overlap heavily. SEO aims for a ranked link on Google and Bing that a buyer clicks. GEO aims for a mention or citation inside an AI-written answer. Both need crawlable, indexed pages with clear answers, and Google says optimizing for its generative AI features is still SEO. The differences show up in measurement, in how much weight off-site brand mentions carry and in how often results change between runs.
Who coined the term generative engine optimization?
The term comes from the paper GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande. It was first posted to arXiv in November 2023 and published at KDD 2024. The authors built a 10,000-query benchmark and found that the best content changes boosted a source's visibility in generated answers by up to 40%.
Does GEO work for a brand-new startup domain?
It can, because citations depend on passages and mentions as well as rankings. In the GEO paper, citing sources raised visibility by 115.1% for the source ranked fifth in search results. A new domain still has to be crawled and indexed first, and engines need some third-party coverage before they recommend a product, so early GEO work pairs page fixes with earning the first reviews and roundup placements.
Do I need llms.txt or special schema for GEO?
Not for Google. Its guide to generative AI features says you don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup to appear, and that structured data is not required. We have not seen any engine document llms.txt as a citation input. Schema that matches your visible text still helps search engines understand a page, but it won't earn citations by itself.
How do I measure whether GEO is working?
Run a fixed set of buyer prompts on every engine each month and record mentions, recommendations and cited pages against a baseline. Add Google's Search Console generative AI performance reports, which show impressions in Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, and the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, which shows citations in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries. Neither report covers the other engines.
