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Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of optimising content specifically for generative systems and response engines such as Google AI Overview, ChatGPT, AskPerplexity or Grok. The focus here is on designing content in such a way that it is better processed and presented more relevantly by AI-controlled response systems.
The term GEO was coined based on the concept of search engine optimisation (SEO): Both aim to improve the visibility of online content and ensure that it effectively reaches the desired target group.

Challenges and goals:
With the introduction of AI-supported answer engines, the question arises as to how content is presented in an environment in which users not only receive a list of links, but direct answers with references.

GEO aims to increase the visibility of content in this context, i.e. the probability that this content will be processed in the response and/or appear there as a link.

Similar terms:
The optimisation of content for AI is also referred to by various other terms and abbreviations that essentially describe the same thing:

This is how the scientists who coined the term GEO define it:

" (...) we introduce Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), the first novel paradigm to aid content creators in improving their content visibility in generative engine responses through a flexible black-box optimization framework for optimizing and defining visibility metrics." (Aggarwal, Pranjal, et al. "Geo: Generative engine optimization." Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2024.)

What is different about GEO compared to SEO?

Aspect SEO GEO
Platform organic Google search, partly Bing AI-based generative Systems, like Google AI Overview, AskPerplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok etc.
Search results SERP with lists of URLs, snippets images/videos, enriched content (similar questions, categories) Flowing text partly more structured with overviews and tables
Desired user behaviour of the website operator Direct traffic to the website by clicking on the URL on the SERP Indirect traffic by clicking on the URL in the references
Objective: Visibility of content in searches/questions ✅ ✅
Keyword-Strategy ✅ ✅
Basic content quality ✅ ✅
Contextualisation of content via meta tags, keywords in the text and backlinks Context must be understood from the text alone

Potential optimisation methods: 
The optimisation measures known to date for the new approach all focus on improving the content: Content must be very clearly formulated and clearly structured. 

In concrete terms this means:

  • Choose and use keywords very carefully. Simply increasing the frequency has no effect.
  • Citing sources and statistics in the content significantly improves visibility in the generative engines.
  • Make stylistic improvements such as better readability and clarity.
  • In the e-commerce sector in particular, this means the targeted optimisation of product information, texts and other content so that they are correctly captured, processed and reproduced in AI-based applications such as generative search engines. This is referred to as e-commerce GEO.

Further information and sources: