Over the past year, one sentence has come up with our clients more than any other: “I asked ChatGPT about our industry. It named our competitor, not us.” Sometimes it is the other way round. The AI does describe the business, but with an old address, a branch that closed years ago, or a service the company never offered. Either way the issue is the same. People now ask some of their questions to an AI assistant instead of a search box, and what the answer says matters to the business directly.
GEO is the name for this problem. In this article we explain the term, how it relates to SEO, how an AI answer is put together, and where a business should start.
What does GEO mean?
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. In short, it is the work of making sure that when tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews answer a question, your business appears in that answer with correct information and, ideally, with a link to your site as a source.
The term took off with an academic paper published in late 2023 and presented at the KDD conference in 2024 (Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”). The researchers built a test set of 10,000 queries and measured how changes to content affected visibility in AI-generated answers. In their setup, methods such as citing sources, adding quotations from credible sources and including concrete statistics improved visibility by up to 40%. Keyword stuffing, on the other hand, barely helped. These results come from a controlled experiment, so they are not a guarantee. But the direction is telling: AI uses clear, well-supported information, not repeated keywords.
How is it different from SEO?
SEO aims to rank high on the search results page and earn the click. GEO aims to be part of the answer the AI writes. Three differences matter:
- Being mentioned instead of being ranked. There is no “position three” in an AI answer. Either you are named, or your information is used without your name, or you are not there at all.
- Being described correctly instead of being clicked. Users often read the answer and leave without visiting any site. What the answer says about you can matter more than how many people reach your site.
- The whole footprint instead of one page. AI does not know you only through your website. Your Google Business Profile, industry directories, news coverage, social accounts and forums are all part of the picture.
GEO is not a rival to SEO, though. Google states plainly that there are no additional requirements or special optimizations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The page has to be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search. So a site that is hard to crawl, slow or vague struggles in AI answers too. We see GEO as a layer built on top of SEO.
AEO, LLMO and other terms
The vocabulary has not settled yet, and the same work goes by several names:
| Term | Stands for | Emphasis |
|---|---|---|
| GEO | Generative Engine Optimization | Appearing in generative AI answers |
| AEO | Answer Engine Optimization | Systems that answer questions directly (featured snippets, voice assistants, AI) |
| LLMO | Large Language Model Optimization | Large language models understanding you correctly |
| AI SEO | - | A broad marketing umbrella |
In practice they all come down to one question: “When an AI describes my business, is it using correct and current information?” You do not need to spend much time on the naming debate. For short definitions, see the GEO, AEO and LLMO glossary entries.
How an AI answer is put together
To understand GEO, it helps to know where the answer comes from. Roughly speaking, there are two sources.
1. Training data
Large language models are trained on a large share of the public web. From this data the model learns language and a great many facts. But that knowledge freezes at a certain date. The branch you opened, the phone number you changed or the service you launched after training ended is not in that “memory”. If the training data holds little or conflicting information about you, the model may mix you up with someone else or even make something up. This is called hallucination.
The bots that collect training data are separate from the others. OpenAI, for example, uses GPTBot for training and OAI-SearchBot to surface sites in ChatGPT search. This distinction matters because you can block one and allow the other. We cover the details in our article on AI crawlers and llms.txt.
2. Live search (RAG)
Most current tools search the web before answering, pull relevant passages from the pages they find, and write the answer based on those passages. This approach is called RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). The idea was described in a 2020 paper (Lewis et al.) and now sits at the core of AI search.
What RAG means for a business: the AI needs to be able to reach your site at that moment, read the page, and find the information it is looking for without effort. Perplexity, ChatGPT search and Google’s AI Overviews show source links with their answers. A site shown as a source gains trust and has a chance at the click.
The two sources work together. The model takes general knowledge from training and current, detailed information from search. So GEO work has two sides as well: in the long run, consistent information about you across the web; in the short run, a site that can be crawled and read.
What it means for a business
What we see in the field varies by industry, but some issues come up almost everywhere:
- Wrong or outdated information. A closed branch, an old phone number, changed opening hours. AI can pull these from different sources and present them as current.
- An incomplete list of services. If your services appear on a single page in three words each, AI either does not know about them or misreads them.
- Being confused with someone else. A company with a similar name, a business in another city, a former trading name. When it is unclear who you are, the model picks one of the possibilities.
- Closed doors. Some sites block AI crawlers without realising it, through CDN or firewall settings. In that case your site is never read during live search.
- A competitor being described instead. If a competitor has published clear, sourced content on the topic, AI uses it. Usually not because they are better, but because their information is easier to reach.
Let us be clear about one thing: nobody can guarantee that an AI will mention you in a given answer, in a given position. Answers change with the wording of the question, the tool being used, even the time of day. What GEO can do is raise the odds of being described correctly, and measure that regularly.
Common false expectations
Because GEO is new, there is no shortage of quick fixes on offer. These are the expectations we hear most often:
- “Let’s add a file and AI will find us.” Files like
llms.txtdo no harm, but on their own they change little. Google states that you do not need new machine-readable files or special markup to appear in its AI features. - “Let’s repeat the keyword more.” In the GEO paper’s experiments, keyword stuffing brought almost no benefit. AI makes use of a clear, well-supported sentence, not the same word read ten times.
- “Let’s teach the AI about us.” Typing “our company is the best” into a chat window does not change the answer other users see. What you write stays within the context of that conversation.
- “A monthly report is enough, we don’t need to touch the site.” Measurement matters, but it fixes nothing by itself. Finding and correcting the source of wrong information is the real work.
- “Let’s do it once and be done.” Models get updated, search results shift, competitors publish. Being described correctly today does not mean you will be in six months.
What these have in common: there are no shortcuts in GEO. What works is unglamorous but solid: an accessible site, consistent information, clear answers to real questions, and regular follow-up.
Where to start
When we start working with a new business, we follow this order:
1. See where you stand today
Write down 15-20 questions your customers might ask. “Companies in Istanbul that sell industrial kitchen equipment”, “What is the address of company X”, “Who should I go to for service Y”. Ask these questions in several AI tools and record the answers. A single screenshot is misleading. We explain how to measure properly in how to measure AI visibility.
2. Check the doors
Look at what your robots.txt file says about AI crawlers. If you use a CDN or firewall, check its bot settings. Which bots to allow and which to block is a business decision. What matters is that you make it knowingly.
3. Make your identity clear
Keep your name, legal name, address, phone, service area and founding year identical on your site, your Google Business Profile and industry directories. Use structured data on the site so machines can read this information too. Structured data is not a magic wand, but it makes it clear who you are.
4. Answer the questions on your site
Write clear, dated, sourced answers to the questions customers actually ask. A separate, substantial page for each service, an FAQ built from real questions, guides with a named author. Google’s own advice points the same way: original, useful content rather than generic, commodity content.
5. Follow up regularly
Ask the same set of questions once a month and record the changes. When you see wrong information, find its source and correct it. GEO is not a one-off setup, it is maintenance.
Summary
- GEO is about your business appearing in AI answers with correct information. It does not mean abandoning SEO, it builds on it.
- AI answers draw on two sources: training data and live search (RAG). Both need consistent information and a readable site.
- Nobody can guarantee a place in AI answers. What you can do is raise the odds and measure regularly.
- The first step is to see where you stand. If you want to know how AI describes your business, you can request a free analysis or read how our visibility service works.