Term · Search & content
Generative engine optimisation (GEO)
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) — also called AI search optimisation or answer engine optimisation — is the practice of improving how a business and its content appear in answers generated by AI systems: AI overviews in search engines and assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity that search the web and cite sources.
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Explained
How AI answers are formed
Most AI search products retrieve relevant web pages from an index, then a language model reads them and writes an answer, often with citations. Visibility depends on being retrievable (indexed and accessible to the product's crawler), relevant to the question, and clear and trustworthy enough to be used.
Main practices
- Access: allow the crawlers of AI search products in robots.txt; deliver content in HTML, not only via JavaScript.
- Clarity: answer-first structure, explicit facts, definitions, comparisons, questions as headings.
- Specificity: local, first-hand information that general sources lack.
- Consistency: the same facts about your business across your site, profiles and directories, supported by structured data.
- Third-party presence: reviews, directory listings, media coverage and industry lists that AI systems draw on.
- Freshness: dates on content and regular updates.
Relationship to SEO
GEO overlaps heavily with SEO: indexability, quality content and authority matter for both. The difference is emphasis — citable statements, entity consistency and presence in sources that assistants rely on.
Measuring
Test a fixed set of prompts regularly in the assistants your customers use, and track referrals from AI tools in analytics. See AI search visibility.
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FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Can we pay to be recommended by AI assistants?
Organic mentions cannot be bought. Some platforms offer advertising, which is separate and labelled.
Is llms.txt required?
No. It is a proposed convention for summarising a site for language models; support is not established. It is cheap to provide but not a substitute for good content.