Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
Also known as: Answer Engine Optimisation, AEO, AI SEO
Making your brand the one an AI assistant names and cites when someone asks it a question in your category — the answer-engine equivalent of ranking.
Last revised 2026-09-07. Also available as markdown — request this URL with Accept: text/markdown.
In plain English
Search used to end with a list of links: ten blue results, and your job was to be near the top. An AI assistant ends with a paragraph instead. It names two or three companies, explains why, and quotes a handful of sources. Being eleventh on Google was a bad day; not being named in that paragraph is invisibility.
GEO is the work of being in the paragraph. Some of it is familiar — be genuinely useful, be crawlable, be clear about who you are. Some of it is new: an answer engine is not choosing a page to send someone to, it is choosing sentences it can safely repeat. That changes what good content looks like.
How to fix / set it up
- Write down the ten questions a buyer actually asks before choosing someone in your category — in their words, not your product's.
- For each question, make sure one page answers it in the first hundred words, in a form that survives being quoted without the surrounding page.
- Make the page retrievable: crawlable by AI crawlers, in the sitemap, with clear headings and a definition-style opening.
- Say who you are in machine-readable form (
Organizationstructured data withsameAs) so the engine can connect your pages to your brand as an entity. - Measure by sampling the engines over time. A single check on a single day tells you nothing about a system that is partly random.
Full guide: how to get cited by AI →AI Visibility Checker →
The technical detail
The mechanics are retrieval, not ranking. A model receives a question, rewrites it into several searches, retrieves passages, and writes an answer grounded in what came back. Your page competes twice: once to be retrieved at all, and again to contain a passage that answers the question on its own. See chunking-passage-retrieval for why the second one surprises people.
GEO is measurable but not with SEO tools. There is no fixed results page to scrape: the same question asked twice can return different brands, and there is no public index of who gets named. The only honest measurement is sampling — ask the engines the questions your buyers ask, repeatedly, and count. That is what this product does.
Nothing here replaces SEO. Google's AI Overviews are grounded largely in pages that already rank, and ChatGPT and Perplexity lean on live search. Ranking remains an input; it has simply stopped being the finish line.
FAQ
Is GEO just SEO with a new name?
They overlap heavily and share most of the technical groundwork, but the objective differs. SEO competes for a position in a list; GEO competes to be the sentence an engine repeats. A page can rank well and still never be quoted, usually because its answer is spread across the page instead of stated in one place.
How long does it take to see a change?
Slower and noisier than search. Answers vary between runs even with no change on your side, so treat a single sample as an anecdote and a trend across several weeks as evidence.
Do I need to block or allow AI crawlers to do GEO?
Allow the ones that answer questions and cite sources, or you cannot be cited by them. Training crawlers are a separate decision — see `ai-crawlers` and `content-signals`.