What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of getting a brand named and cited inside AI-generated answers, in the way SEO aimed to get a page ranked in a list of links.
GEO covers the work of being recommended when someone asks an assistant a buying question, rather than being ranked when they type a keyword into a search box. The output it targets is a sentence naming you, not a position in a list.
The practical difference from SEO is where the influence comes from. A search ranking is largely a property of your own pages. An AI recommendation is assembled mostly from what other sources say about you, so a great deal of GEO work happens off your own site: reviews, comparison articles, forum threads, and the structured data that lets an engine connect those mentions to one entity.
The term is contested. Some vendors use AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) for the same thing, and some use both. Nothing turns on the label.
Related
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)Answer Engine Optimization is another name for optimising to be named inside AI-generated answers. In practice it is used interchangeably with GEO.
- AI visibilityAI visibility is how often, and how prominently, a brand is named by AI assistants when people ask questions in its category.
- CitationA citation is a source an AI assistant links or refers to in support of an answer it has given.
Want to know where you actually stand on this? Run a free visibility check or try the free tools.