What Is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of getting your business named and cited in the answers that AI tools write: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews. SEO tries to put your page in a list of links. GEO tries to put your facts, and your name, inside the answer itself, because a growing share of people read the answer and never click a link.

Most of GEO is good SEO done with a different reader in mind. A smaller part is specific to how these systems pick sources. Below is what the research actually found, what we changed on our own site, and the parts of the GEO hype I would skip.

Where the term comes from

GEO comes from a 2023 research paper by a team led by researchers at Princeton, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, later accepted at KDD 2024. They built a test set of queries, ran them through a generative search engine, and measured how visible each source was in the answer after rewriting the source in different ways.

Their headline finding: some edits raised a source's visibility by up to 40%. The methods that worked best were adding citations to credible sources, adding quotations, and adding statistics. The detail most summaries leave out is that the gains were uneven. Citing sources helped pages that started low in the results a great deal, and actually hurt the page that started first. In practice, GEO helps sources that are already in contention move up inside the answer.

Why it matters now

When Google shows an AI Overview, fewer people click through. Ahrefs measured a 34.5% lower average click-through rate on informational searches that showed one. If your buyers ask an AI tool "who does X near me" or "what does Y cost", the business named in the answer gets the call, and the businesses on page one below it get less than they used to.

What actually moves you into AI answers

Be the clearest source for a specific fact. AI answers are assembled from statements that can be lifted cleanly: a price, a timeline, a definition, a number. "Our websites start with a $4,999 build" can be quoted. "Affordable pricing" cannot. Put the facts a buyer would ask about on your pages, in plain sentences.

Back claims with sources. This is the strongest result in the research. Cite the study, the regulation or the vendor's own page next to the claim, the way this post does.

Be mentioned elsewhere. AI tools lean on what other credible sites say about you: reviews, directories, partner pages, press, forum threads where your name comes up. A site that only talks about itself gives a model little reason to trust it.

Let the crawlers in. If an AI company's crawler cannot fetch your pages, nothing else matters. Check your robots.txt, and check your CDN or firewall too, since bot blocking there is a more common cause than robots.txt.

Keep the same facts everywhere. If your website, Google Business Profile and directory listings disagree on your services or address, a model has to pick one, and it may pick wrong.

What we did on our own site

We sell GEO, so we made the changes on whitespacesolutions.ai first. Here is what we did, and what we found while doing it.

We fixed a robots.txt mistake that was worse than blocking. Our robots file used to have a separate rule group for each AI crawler (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others) that said "allow everything". robots.txt groups do not inherit from each other: a crawler obeys only the most specific group that names it. So those well-meant groups exempted ten AI crawlers from every restriction in the file, including the private paths where client reports live. We replaced them with one group that applies to every crawler. If your robots.txt has named AI groups, check them for the same problem.

We publish a fact sheet for AI tools. Our llms.txt lists our services, prices, proof points and every public URL, generated from the same data file that feeds the website, so it cannot drift out of date. No major AI company has said it reads llms.txt, so we treat it as cheap insurance, not a ranking lever.

We tell machines what each page is about. Every page declares its main subject in its structured data, linked to the matching Wikidata entry where one exists, so a page about AI agents says it is about AI agents rather than about our company. Here is the honest part: no search or AI company documents using this markup for ranking or citation. We did it because it costs almost nothing and removes ambiguity, and we do not expect a ranking change from it.

We made the About page say, in plain text, what the structured data says. Founding year, location, service areas and the services we offer are written out on the About page, from the same source as the markup. Markup that the visible page does not back up gets discounted.

We notify search engines when pages change. After each deploy our sitemap is resubmitted to Google, and new and updated URLs go to IndexNow, which feeds Bing among others. Bing's index matters for GEO because several AI tools draw on it to find pages.

What to skip

• Writing for robots. Keyword-stuffed headings and "AI-friendly" filler read badly to people and give a model nothing to quote.
• Tools that promise to get you into ChatGPT. Nobody controls what a model says. What you control is whether your business is easy to find, quote and check.
• Treating GEO as separate from SEO. The pages that get cited are usually pages that already rank, and our GEO vs SEO comparison shows how much of the work the two share. Fix the fundamentals first.

How to check whether it is working

Ask the AI tools the questions your buyers ask, in their words, every month, and write down who gets named, or pay one of the generative engine optimization tools to run those prompts daily. Watch for referral traffic from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai in your analytics. And track the plain SEO numbers too, because they move together.

If you want this done for your business, including the monthly checks, that is our generative engine optimization service. For a practical walkthrough of getting named in ChatGPT specifically, see how to rank in ChatGPT.