What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?

GEO (generative engine optimization) is the work of making your content more likely to be quoted or cited when an AI assistant or AI search tool writes an answer, not just ranked as a link.

At a glance

• The term comes from a 2023 research paper by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues, accepted to the KDD 2024 conference.
• SEO aims for a ranking position. GEO aims for a mention, a quote or a citation inside the generated answer.
• In the paper’s tests, adding sources, quotations and statistics did the most for visibility. Keyword stuffing did little or nothing.
• Results varied by subject, so there’s no single method that works for every kind of question.
• Findings from one system don’t automatically carry over to another. Measure the assistants your buyers actually use.

How GEO works

An AI answer tool retrieves a set of pages, then writes one response from them. Your page can be retrieved and still contribute nothing to what the reader sees. GEO is about the second step: making the content on the page easy to lift into an answer and credible enough to cite.

The paper measured visibility two ways: how many words from a source appear in the answer, weighted by how early they appear, and a broader impression score. It built a benchmark of queries across many subjects, called GEO-bench, to test changes to source pages.

What the research found

• Evidence helps. Citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics gave a 30% to 40% relative lift on the word-count measure.
• Clear writing helps. Making text more fluent and easier to read lifted visibility by 15% to 30%.
• Tone alone doesn’t. A more persuasive, authoritative tone gave no significant improvement.
• Keyword stuffing doesn’t. Adding more keywords offered little to no gain.
• Smaller sites gained most. Pages ranked fifth in search results gained far more from citing sources than pages ranked first.

Example (illustrative): a glossary page says “most teams target 3x coverage”. Rewritten for GEO, it names who published the benchmark, the year and the sample, so an answer tool can quote it with a source attached.

Common GEO mistakes

• Treating it as SEO with a new name. The paper found keyword tactics did little here. Facts with sources did more.
• Generalizing from one assistant. What works in one AI search tool may not hold in another. Test the prompts your buyers would type, in each tool.
• Unsourced numbers. A figure with no source is harder to cite and easier to get wrong.
• Measuring only clicks. An answer that names you may send no traffic. Track whether you’re mentioned, and how.

How GEO shows up in a revenue system

GEO is marketing work, but sales feels it early. A buyer who read an AI answer about your category arrives at the discovery call with that framing already set. Content that answers buyer questions plainly helps both sides. Our sales pods run the other half: the outbound and the calls.

Terms that sit next to GEO

GEO overlaps with inbound marketing and demand generation, since both depend on content buyers find on their own. The questions worth answering come from your buyer persona and your ICP, and the clearest pages state a value proposition plainly.