Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

GEO is the practice of getting your content cited and surfaced inside AI-generated answers — the responses from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, and similar engines. Where classic SEO optimises for a ranking position in a list, GEO optimises for being quoted, referenced, or named as the source inside a synthesised answer.

The foundations overlap with SEO — you must be crawlable, authoritative, and clearly structured — but the tactics tilt toward being quotable. Write self-contained passages that answer a full question without needing the rest of the page, state clear factual claims and statistics an engine can lift, define entities unambiguously, and back it with solid structured data. Then measure it: track brand mentions and citations across AI engines, because this traffic often will not show up as clicks in your analytics.

GEO is moving from experiment to necessity as AI answers absorb query volume that used to produce clicks. The strategic shift is from "rank and get the click" to "be the cited source and win the mention", which changes how you value content and how you report. Senior practitioners are building the measurement layer now, deciding which topics are worth being the reference on, and treating entity authority and consistent factual claims across the web as the levers that determine whether the models trust you.