GEO (generative engine optimization)
GEO (generative engine optimization) is the work of making a brand and its content more likely to be accurately mentioned, cited and recommended in answers written by AI models.
Area
SEO and AEO
What it means in practice
The term comes from a 2023 research paper that studied how changes to content affect visibility in AI-generated answers. It now covers efforts to show up in tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.
GEO work usually covers three areas.
Your own site: clear, well-structured pages that say what you do, for whom and how you compare, with facts an AI system can lift and cite.
The wider web: accurate descriptions of your company in reviews, directories, comparison articles, forums and press, because models draw on these.
Technical access: making sure the crawlers used by AI search can reach the pages you want seen, with clean structure and structured data.
GEO overlaps heavily with SEO and AEO. Strong pages, clearly defined entities and one consistent description of the company help all three.
Why it matters for B2B and AI teams
AI assistants increasingly shape B2B shortlists. A buyer asks which tools solve a problem, and the answer names a handful of companies. If a model can’t describe your product clearly, or describes it wrong, you lose that buyer before they reach your site.
Positioning matters here. When your category, buyer and difference are stated the same way everywhere, models are more likely to repeat that description. Inconsistent messaging produces inconsistent AI answers.
How we approach it
Clear positioning and a well-structured website are the base GEO builds on, and both sit at the center of our work. We design brand identities and websites to make a product easier to understand for people. The same clarity helps the machines that summarize you.
FAQ
It builds on SEO. The foundations are shared, and GEO adds attention to how AI models describe and recommend brands. That depends on mentions across the web as well as your own pages.
Only indirectly. You can make accurate information easy to find and consistent across your site and other sources, which improves the odds that models describe you correctly.
Blocking them can keep your content out of AI answers. Some AI companies run separate crawlers for model training and for search, so you can allow one and block the other. Most B2B companies that want to be recommended allow the crawlers used for AI search. Review your robots.txt with that goal in mind.
Keep exploring
Related terms
AEO (answer engine optimization)
AEO (answer engine optimization) is the work of structuring content so search features and AI assistants can find it, understand it and use it in direct answers.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed standard for a plain-text Markdown file at the root of a website that gives AI models a short guide to the site’s most useful content.
Schema markup
Schema markup is structured data added to a page’s code. It uses the shared Schema.org vocabulary to tell search engines and AI systems what the content describes.
Positioning
Positioning is the set of decisions about who your product is for, what buyers will compare it with and why it’s the better choice for them.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the work that helps search engines crawl, render, understand and index a website. It covers the site’s structure, speed, code and settings.
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