GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

GEO (generative engine optimization) is the work of adjusting a brand’s content and presence so that AI systems that write their own answers, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews, pick your pages as sources and mention your name. GEO is measured by how often you appear in AI-written answers, not by your position in a list of links.

What is GEO?

The name comes from the research paper “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues (Princeton University, IIT Delhi), first posted on arXiv in November 2023 and accepted at the KDD 2024 conference (arXiv 2311.09735, November 2023, revised June 2024). The authors call these systems “generative engines”: they pull several sources from the web and use a large language model to summarize them into one answer with citations. Website owners have almost no control over whether their content gets used.

What did the GEO research measure?

The authors built GEO-bench, a set of 10,000 queries drawn from 9 sources, and tested 9 ways of editing source content. Visibility was measured by how many words from a source appeared in the answer (weighted by position) and by a subjective impression score rated by a model. A few results stand out:

• Adding statistics, adding quotations and citing sources raised visibility by up to about 40%. Keyword stuffing had almost no effect.
• Lower-ranked pages gained more. With the Cite Sources method, the page in fifth position on the search results page gained 115.1% in visibility, while the top-ranked page lost 30.3% on average.
• When tested on Perplexity.ai, the improvement reached up to 37%.

The experiment was run in 2023, and AI systems have changed a lot since then, so treat the numbers as a reference only.

What does Google say about GEO?

In May 2026, Google Search Central published guidance on optimizing for generative AI features in Google Search. Google put it plainly: from Google Search’s point of view, optimizing for generative AI search is still optimizing for the search experience, so it is still SEO. The guidance also lists things you do not need to do for Google: create an llms.txt file, chop content into small chunks for AI, rewrite pages specifically for AI, or chase unnatural brand mentions (Google Search Central, May 2026, updated July 2026).

The technical requirements have not changed: a page that wants to be a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in Google (Google Search Central, AI features and your website, December 2025). ChatGPT and Perplexity have not fully disclosed how they choose sources, so GEO outside Google relies mostly on testing and measuring.

GEO vs AEO vs SEO

Many people use AEO and GEO interchangeably. Adtek groups this work under one name, AIO (AI Optimization).

Frequently asked questions

Will GEO replace SEO?

No. AI Overviews and AI Mode draw their sources from Google’s index. A page that is not indexed cannot be cited.

How do you measure GEO results?

For Google, the generative AI performance report in Search Console shows impressions for each URL in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google opened this report to all websites on August 31, 2026 (Google Search Central Blog, June 2026). For ChatGPT or Perplexity, you can run a fixed set of questions every month and count how many times the brand is mentioned.

Can small businesses do GEO?

Yes. The result for the fifth-ranked page above is a good hint.

If you want to know how AI currently talks about your website and need an SEO plan that also covers visibility in AI, Adtek’s SEO team can go through it with you on our contact page.