What is GEO? How generative engine optimization gets your content into AI-generated answers

GEO, short for generative engine optimization, is the name for a set of methods that increase how visible a piece of content is in the answers of search engines that use language models to gather and summarize information. Instead of a list of links, these systems deliver a ready-made answer built from multiple sources.

The term was coined in an academic paper published on arXiv, which calls these systems generative engines. The authors point to BingChat, Google's SGE and Perplexity.ai as examples: they retrieve relevant documents from the web and generate an answer grounded in those sources, with attribution so users can check the information.

Why it matters for publishers

According to the study, what users and search engines gain comes at a cost to websites and content creators. Because the answer arrives complete, people no longer need to visit the sites, which can cut into their organic traffic and visibility. The authors note that millions of small businesses and individuals depend on that traffic to make a living.

Then there is the lack of control. Generative engines work like a black box and change quickly, and publishers have little or no control over when and how their content shows up in the answers.

How GEO works

GEO takes a website and returns an optimized version of it, adjusting the presentation, the writing style and the content to gain visibility. The method does not depend on knowing how each search engine works under the hood.

The way visibility is measured changes too. In traditional search, the average position in the results list is the yardstick. In generative engines, sites appear as citations inside the answer, with different lengths, positions and styles, so the study proposes its own metrics, which take into account, for example, how relevant and influential the citation is to the query.

To test the methods, the authors built GEO-bench, a set of 10,000 queries from a range of domains and sources. The tests showed that GEO can boost visibility in answers by up to 40%. Adding citations, quotes from relevant sources and statistics delivered gains of more than 40%, and the effect varied by domain, which, in the authors' view, calls for domain-specific optimization.

What Google says

Google Search Central documentation on AI Overviews and AI Mode states that these features require no special optimization. To appear as a supporting link, a page needs to be indexed, be eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet and meet Search's technical requirements. There are no other technical requirements.

Google recommends sticking to SEO fundamentals: allow crawling in robots.txt, make content easy to find through internal links, keep important content in text form and make sure structured data matches the visible text on the page. The company also says traffic from these features is included in Search Console reports, under the Web search type.

For brand teams, the two sources complement each other. The study suggests that the form content takes, with citations, quotes from sources and statistics, can influence its presence in AI-generated answers. Google says that, for its own features, the foundation is still solid SEO and helpful, reliable, people-first content.