What is generative engine optimization (GEO), and how does it work?
GEO started as a 2023 research paper and became a job title. Here is what the paper actually tested, what worked, and what GEO means in practice now.
What is generative engine optimization? It is the work of making your content the source AI answer engines draw on and cite. The name, and the first evidence for it, come from a research paper, so that is the right place to start.
What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?
Generative engines answer a question by retrieving several sources and summarising them with a language model. GEO aims to make your page one of those sources and to make your content show up prominently in the answer. It complements SEO rather than replacing it: most engines still retrieve from a search index first.
Where the term comes from
Pranjal Aggarwal and co-authors introduced GEO in a 2023 paper, later accepted at KDD 2024. They built GEO-bench, a benchmark of queries across domains, rewrote source pages with different methods and measured how visible each source became in the generated answers.
What the GEO research found
| Method | Result in the paper |
|---|---|
| Cite sources, Quotation addition, Statistics addition | Strongest gains; the paper reports visibility gains of up to 40% |
| Fluency and easy-to-understand rewrites | Also improved visibility |
| Keyword stuffing | Little to no improvement |
| On Perplexity.ai (a live engine) | Visibility improvements up to 37% |
Two findings matter most for smaller sites. Gains varied by domain, so there is no single recipe. And lower-ranked websites benefited significantly more than top-ranked ones, because generative engines read content directly rather than relying only on signals like backlinks.
What is AEO and GEO?
Answer engine optimization (AEO) grew out of featured snippets and voice answers: structure content so a system can lift a direct answer. GEO covers the newer generative engines that write a synthesised answer with citations. In practice the work overlaps heavily; see SEO vs GEO vs AEO.
How GEO works in practice
- Be retrievable: let AI crawlers in and render content in HTML. Check with the AI crawler checker.
- Answer first, then support it. See answer-first content.
- Add evidence: sourced statistics, attributed quotes and citations, as the paper tested. Score a page with the AI citability checker.
- Be consistent about who you are across the web; see the entity consistency checker.
- Measure: track a fixed prompt set over time with the AI visibility tracker.
GEO-bench rewrote pages in a controlled setting; real engines change often. Treat the paper's numbers as direction, not a forecast. Our GEO service starts from your own baseline.
Questions people ask
What is generative engine optimization in simple terms?
Making your content more likely to be used and cited when AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews answer a question.
Who coined generative engine optimization?
Pranjal Aggarwal and co-authors, in a 2023 paper titled "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization", accepted at KDD 2024.
Does keyword stuffing work for GEO?
Not in the research. The GEO paper found keyword stuffing offered little to no improvement, while citations, quotations and statistics helped most.
Is GEO different from SEO?
It builds on SEO, since most AI engines retrieve from search indexes, but optimises for being quoted inside an answer rather than ranking as a link.
Want this mapped onto your product?
See how our GEO work runs, or send your store link and a founder will reply personally.
