Blog

What is generative engine optimization (GEO)? A plain-English answer

By · - Where the term came from, what the research behind it actually measured, how it differs from SEO, what it costs, and what our own citation log showed when we checked.

An open oak card-catalogue drawer full of blank index cards, one card raised above the rest with a brass clip, for generative engine optimization

The short answer

Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the work of getting your business named and quoted inside AI-written answers — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. SEO tries to rank your page in a list of links. GEO tries to get a sentence from your page, or your business name, into the answer itself.

That's the whole definition. The rest of this post is what it means in practice, because the term now gets sold harder than it gets explained.

Where the word came from

GEO isn't an agency coinage. It comes from a research paper, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization", by researchers from Princeton and IIT Delhi, first posted in November 2023 and published at the KDD 2024 conference. They built a test set of 10,000 queries, rewrote source pages in nine different ways, and measured how much of each page ended up in the AI's answer.

The results are more useful than the headline number everyone repeats. From the full paper:

  • Adding quotations raised visibility by about 41 percent against the unedited page, adding statistics by 33 percent, and citing sources by 28 percent. That's where the famous "up to 40 percent" comes from
  • Keyword stuffing made things worse. It scored 17.8 against a baseline of 19.5 on the paper's main measure. The oldest SEO trick in the book lost ground
  • Smaller sites gained the most. Citing sources lifted the page ranked fifth in normal search by 115 percent, while the top-ranked page lost about 30 percent on average. In an AI answer, the page with the evidence can beat the page with the ranking

Keep one caveat in mind. These were controlled experiments on a research engine, not measurements of ChatGPT in the wild, and the engines have changed a lot since 2023. The direction has held up, though: answers quote pages that state specific, checkable things.

GEO vs SEO, side by side

They overlap more than the vendors selling one or the other admit. Here's where they actually differ.

SEOGEO
What winsA position in a list of ten linksA mention or a quoted line inside the answer
Unit that gets usedThe whole pageA short passage, often a sentence or two
Where the evidence comes fromMostly your site and links pointing at itYour site plus review platforms, directories and forums the assistant trusts
How you measure itRankings, clicks, Search ConsoleCitations and mentions, asked question by question
Official reportingMature, with clicksNew since 2026, and impressions or citations only
How stable it isMoves over weeksThe same question can get a different answer tomorrow

Google, for its part, doesn't think the distinction matters much. Its own guide to optimizing for generative AI features, published in May 2026, says optimizing for generative AI search "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." The same guide says you don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files or Markdown copies of your pages to appear, and that there's no need to chop content into tiny pieces. For Google's surfaces, that's the authoritative answer.

For ChatGPT and Perplexity, the picture is different. They run their own live searches, and the citation studies in our AI SEO guide show them leaning heavily on review sites and forums. That part of GEO is closer to reputation work than to page work.

Why owners are hearing about it now

Because the click is disappearing from under the ranking. Pew Research tracked the actual browsing of 900 US adults and found that when a Google results page showed an AI summary, people clicked a regular result on 8 percent of visits, against 15 percent without one. They clicked a link inside the summary on 1 percent. Ranking third under an AI answer is worth less than it was.

And for the first time, you can see some of it. Microsoft added an AI Performance report to Bing Webmaster Tools in February 2026, counting how often Copilot and Bing's AI summaries cite your pages and which queries triggered it. Google followed with generative AI performance reports in Search Console in June and rolled them out to every site on August 31, 2026. Google's report shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, with no click data yet. Both are free. Neither covers ChatGPT.

What we found when we checked ourselves

We keep a citation log: the same five buyer questions, asked word for word, sources recorded. The first run, in July 2026, was humbling. On four questions an owner would actually type — how to market with no time, what outsourced marketing costs, whether AI can write the posts, done-for-you versus hiring — our site was cited on none. Over thirty different domains were, with almost no overlap between questions. Reddit or YouTube showed up on three of the four.

The branded question was worse. Asked about us by name, Perplexity answered from our LinkedIn page, not our website, and described a product we'd retired two months earlier. It also mixed us up with unrelated companies that share the word "Sunday." That's GEO failing in the most basic way: the assistant didn't know which entity we were. Rewriting the LinkedIn page and declaring the site and profile as one entity in our structured data were the first fixes, both done the same day.

Two findings from a longer log we keep on another of our sites match the research above. About 99 percent of the citations were lifted from short, self-contained passages of roughly 200 characters. And the largest single jump didn't come from the site at all: getting reviews onto a directory the assistants already read moved the share of answers naming the brand from about 1 percent to 53.5 percent. Our AI SEO guide turns that into five levers in order.

What GEO work actually looks like for a small business

Strip out the jargon and most of it is ordinary work done with a specific reader in mind.

  • Put the answer first. Price, timeline, service area, yes or no — in the first sentence under the heading, not after four paragraphs of warm-up
  • Write the specific number. "$180 for a 60-minute session" can be quoted. "Competitive pricing" can't
  • Get reviewed where the assistants look. Google, Yelp and the directories in your industry. The review system we run is the single highest-return piece of this
  • Tell one story about who you are. Same name, address, phone and description on your site, Business Profile, LinkedIn and directories
  • Let the crawlers in and serve real HTML. A robots.txt that blocks OAI-SearchBot or a site that only renders in JavaScript keeps you out regardless of the writing
  • Ask the questions monthly and write down who gets cited. The gap between you and whoever is named is your to-do list

None of that needs a special file. We publish an llms.txt anyway, and the honest case for and against it is its own post.

What it costs

Agencies have started pricing GEO as its own line. WebFX, one of the few that publishes numbers, puts small-business GEO retainers at $1,500 to $5,000 a month, with its own AI search service starting at $3,000. Tracking software is cheaper: Otterly.AI charges $29 a month for 15 tracked prompts, $189 for 100 and $489 for 400, covering ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot, with Gemini, Claude and AI Mode as add-ons.

Before paying for either, run the free version. Open Bing Webmaster Tools and Search Console, then ask ChatGPT and Perplexity the five questions your customers would ask and write down who gets named. That takes an afternoon, and it tells you whether you have a GEO problem or a reviews problem.

We don't sell GEO separately. It's part of Organic Growth, $1,000 a month CAD, alongside the content, search and review work it depends on, and our AI SEO page lists what's in it. Search takes about 90 days to move, and AI answers tend to follow search, so expect the same wait.

Where GEO gets oversold

Nobody can guarantee a mention in ChatGPT. The answers change between runs, and the engines change their source mix without notice. A pitch that promises placement is selling something the vendor doesn't control.

Watch for three other things. A "GEO audit" that's a regular SEO audit with a new cover page. Content chunked into dozens of thin pages "for the AI," which Google's guide specifically says isn't needed. And monthly reports built on a handful of prompts, where one lucky mention looks like a trend.

And the honest limit: if your customers find you through referrals and a Google Business Profile, and nobody's asking an assistant about businesses like yours yet, a solid local SEO setup gets you most of the way. Local SEO is the cheaper place to start, and a freelancer who does it well will beat any GEO retainer on price — that's a real answer.

Sources

See what the assistants say about you

Book a free consultation and we'll bring the answers ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity give about your business today, and who they name instead. For the practical levers, read AI SEO for small business; for the file everyone asks about, llms.txt, explained.