What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of making your pages, and what other sites say about you, more likely to be used, cited and recommended when AI systems write answers to the questions your buyers ask.

Where the term comes from

The name comes from a 2023 research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, by six authors at Princeton University and IIT Delhi or working independently. It was posted to arXiv in November 2023 and accepted to KDD 2024.

The authors tested rewritten source texts in a controlled benchmark and on Perplexity using uploaded files, not live website changes. The paper reports visibility gains of up to 40% in its benchmark from methods such as adding citations, quotations and statistics. Keyword stuffing offered little to no improvement.

"Visible" meant how much of the answer drew on a source and how high it appeared, not clicks or customers. These tests don't establish what the same edits will do in current search products.

What changes in the work

The unit is the answer, not the ranking. You track a fixed list of buyer questions and whether you are mentioned, cited or recommended.
Claims need to be plain and sourced. Pages that state what you do, for whom and at what price, with evidence, are easier to quote. The paper's results point the same way.
Other sites are part of the work. Google says its AI features may run multiple related searches across sources to build one answer. What review profiles, "best tools" lists and forum threads say about you becomes part of the job.

What doesn't change

Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimizations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and you don't need new machine-readable files or special schema. Crawlable pages, useful content and accurate product facts still do most of the work.

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is an overlapping name for the same goal. I treat SEO, GEO and AEO as one job with one set of pages.

Why it matters for a SaaS founder

The decision it informs is whether to fund GEO as a separate line item. I wouldn't. Nobody controls what a model says, and even Google notes that its two AI features can show different responses and links. Anyone promising a guaranteed ChatGPT recommendation is selling something they can't deliver.

Fund the pages and fixes your buyers need, measure them in Google and AI answers, and count the customers they bring.

Example

Tracebit is an invented 30-person observability startup. A GEO proposal suggests rewriting 200 blog posts with statistics. A better first month: a comparison page against the competitor that AI answers recommend instead, a pricing page that states the price, and a fix so the docs render without JavaScript. Then ask the same buyer questions again next month.

Frequently asked questions

Is GEO different from SEO?

They overlap heavily. GEO adds a different unit of measurement and attention to the sources AI answers cite, including other sites. The foundations, pages that can be crawled and are worth quoting, are the same.

Who coined generative engine optimization?

The term comes from the 2023 paper by Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan and Deshpande, published on arXiv and accepted to KDD 2024.

No. OpenAI says placement in ChatGPT search isn't guaranteed. Models and answers change. You can make your product easier to find, understand and cite, then measure what happens.