What Is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)? The honest answer

Introduction

“Generative engine optimisation” has become one of the most overhyped terms in search marketing. A cottage industry of tools, frameworks, and consultants has built careers on it. Courses have been written. Service lines launched. Budgets reallocated.

That doesn’t mean GEO isn’t real. It means most of what’s being sold as GEO is SEO under a new name.

This post explains what generative engine optimisation actually is, what the evidence says drives AI citation, and why the best thing most businesses can do for AI visibility is focus on fundamentals they may already be neglecting. We’ll cover: what GEO means and where the term came from, how AI platforms actually retrieve content, the real relationship between SEO and GEO, what genuinely differs, and how to measure performance across AI surfaces.

What Does GEO Mean? A Straight Definition

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of structuring your content and digital presence so that AI-powered platforms, including Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, cite or reference your brand when generating answers to user queries. The term was formally introduced in a 2023 research paper by academics from Princeton University, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI, and IIT Delhi, presented at the KDD 2024 conference.

GEO also goes by several other names in the industry:

• AEO:answer engine optimisation
• LLMO:large language model optimisation
• AIO:AI optimisation
• GSO:generative search optimisation

All four describe overlapping practices. The terminology is inconsistent because vendors and researchers have coined labels independently, not because the underlying practices are meaningfully different. We’ll come back to that.

The key distinction from traditional SEO is in the outcome being optimised for. SEO targets clicks and rankings in a search results page. GEO targets citations and brand mentions inside AI-generated responses, where there may be no link to click at all.

Two terms worth defining clearly before going further:

A large language model (LLM) is a type of AI system trained on vast quantities of text data and capable of generating coherent, contextually relevant responses to natural language queries. The models powering ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are all LLMs.

An AI Overviewis Google’s AI-generated answer box, which appears above traditional organic results for a growing proportion of search queries and synthesises information from multiple indexed sources.

These are the two AI surfaces most relevant to GEO for most businesses. Understanding how they actually work is where the GEO conversation gets interesting.

So What Actually Is GEO, If It’s Mostly SEO?

GEO is not a replacement for SEO. It is SEO done properly, with a specific emphasis on content structure, topical authority, and off-site presence. To be direct: any SEO strategy that neglects these things was already questionable. Clear content structure, topical depth, and building authority beyond your own website have been standard best practice since the early 2010s. GEO hasn’t invented new rules; it has made the consequences of ignoring the old ones more visible.

That said, GEO does add something. Not a parallel discipline requiring a separate budget, but a specific direction of travel that your SEO should already be heading.

The three content changes that genuinely improve AI citation rates

• Content extractability

AI systems chunk content and retrieve passages in isolation. A paragraph that only makes sense in the context of the one before it is harder for an AI to cite accurately. Self-contained sections, direct opening answers, and front-loaded information all help. This isn’t a new concept; it’s what good structured writing has always required.

• Statistics and source citations within your content

This is the highest-impact single change the evidence supports. The Princeton GEO-bench study found that adding verifiable statistics to content improved AI citation rates by around 40%, and adding attributable quotations from credible sources improved them by a similar margin. Quoting authoritative sources inside your own content signals the kind of researched, reliable material that AI systems prefer to extract.

• Entity clarity and structured data

Consistent name, address, and contact information alongside schema markup helps AI systems correctly identify and categorise your brand. This is standard technical SEO, applied with AI retrieval in mind.

Topical authority is the degree to which a website is recognised by search engines and AI systems as a credible and comprehensive source on a particular subject, built through consistent, thorough content coverage of a defined topic area. It underpins all three of the above. Without it, extractability and statistics only get you so far.

Entity, in the context of search and AI, refers to a real-world object or concept, such as a brand, person, or place, that can be consistently identified and referenced across sources. Entity clarity is what allows AI systems to talk about your brand accurately, even when they are not directly citing your website.

Off-site presence matters too. Google AI Overviews cite pages that rank. ChatGPT draws from training data that over-represents Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, and high-authority publications. Building genuine brand presence on these platforms matters, but this is digital PR and community building, not a new GEO-specific tactic.

As James Scherer of Foundation Inc framed it:
“SEO is your space; GEO is all that stuff plus external influences.”
The Whitehat SEO analysis of Google’s own guidance puts it more directly, citing both Google VP Robby Stein and John Mueller:

“Optimising for AI search is the same as optimising for traditional search”.

How AI Platforms Decide What to Cite

AI platforms select content to cite based on relevance, authority, recency, and structural clarity. These are the same signals that determine organic search rankings, applied at the passage level rather than the page level. Content that is clear, well-structured, backed by verifiable data, and written by a recognised authority on a topic will consistently outperform content that is not, across both traditional search and AI citation.

• Relevance: Semantic match to the query, not keyword match. LLMs understand concepts. You do not need the exact phrase; you need comprehensive coverage of the topic. Notably, the Princeton GEO-bench study found that keyword stuffing, a tactic that still appears in some SEO playbooks, actively worsened AI visibility compared to an unoptimised baseline.
• Authority signals: E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is Google’s quality rater framework for evaluating content quality, widely understood to influence both organic rankings and the likelihood of being cited in AI-generated answers. Content written by identified experts with a demonstrable background in the subject, with clear author attribution, is significantly more likely to be cited. Domain authority correlates strongly with AI citation frequency, according to Ahrefs data from July 2025
• Recency: AI platforms, especially Perplexity and ChatGPT with live search enabled, show a clear recency bias. Amsive research from 2025 found that 50% of content cited by AI platforms was less than 13 weeks old at the time of citation. Regular content refreshes matter more for AI visibility than they do for traditional SEO.
• Structural clarity: Clear heading hierarchy, self-contained paragraphs, and FAQ schema all help AI systems extract and attribute content accurately. The Princeton study is unambiguous on this: statistics addition and quotation addition were the two highest-impact improvements tested, while keyword stuffing performed below the unoptimised baseline.
• Platform variance: Not all AI surfaces behave identically. Perplexity cites heavily from Google’s top 10, with 91% domain overlap according to a Semrush study from July 2025. Google AI Overviews are even more SEO-dependent. ChatGPT is the outlier, drawing from Bing, training data, and a broader source pool that includes Reddit, Wikipedia, and academic sources.

Schema markup is structured data code added to a webpage that explicitly communicates content meaning to search engines and AI systems, helping them categorise and extract information accurately. FAQ schema in particular, improves the likelihood of individual questions and answers being retrieved as standalone passages.

GEO vs SEO vs AEO: What the Labels Actually Mean

GEO, SEO, and AEO (answer engine optimisation) describe overlapping practices that the industry has labelled separately, largely because vendors and consultants benefit from the perception of distinct disciplines. In practice, they sit on a spectrum: SEO is the foundation, AEO adds answer-focused content structuring, and GEO extends both into the off-site presence that influences how AI systems learn about your brand over time.

The terminology chaos is real and worth acknowledging. According to an EMARKETER FAQ published in April 2026, fewer than a third of SEO influencers maintained consistent GEO terminology throughout 2025. The same practice is called GEO, AEO, LLMO, AIO, and GSO depending on who is writing. These are all describing the same direction of travel.

Answer engine optimisation (AEO)is the practice of structuring content specifically to be selected as a direct answer by AI-driven systems, including Google’s featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, and AI Overviews. AEO and GEO are often used interchangeably, though AEO tends to refer to on-site structured content while GEO extends to off-site presence.

The honest framing: SEO is the prerequisite. AEO is about winning the answer itself. GEO adds the off-site dimension that influences how AI systems represent your brand beyond your own website.

The table above is a simplification, but a useful one. None of these disciplines requires a separate budget or a separate agency. They require the same thing: a coherent content and authority-building strategy, executed consistently.

What GEO Means for Your SEO Strategy in Practice

If you are doing strong SEO, you are already doing most of what GEO requires. The practical additions are targeted: structure your content for passage-level extraction, include verifiable data with proper attribution, keep cornerstone content regularly refreshed, and build genuine brand presence in the communities and publications your target audience uses. That is the whole GEO checklist, no mysticism required.

1. Rank first, worry about GEO second.
   If your pages do not rank in Google’s top 10, Perplexity (91% domain overlap with Google’s top 10, Semrush, July 2025) and AI Overviews (76.1% of cited URLs from Google’s top 10, Ahrefs, July 2025) will not find them. Your SEO services foundation comes first. Everything else follows from it.>
2. Structure every section for standalone retrieval.
   Open each H2 with a direct, self-contained answer. Front-load the key point. Use a clear heading hierarchy. Avoid prose that only makes sense in the context of what came before it. A well-structured keyword strategy supports this at the planning stage.
3. Add data and sources. T
   he Princeton GEO-bench study is unambiguous: adding quantified statistics and attributable quotations is the highest-impact single content change for AI citation rates, improving visibility by around 40%. Replace vague claims with specific numbers and proper sourcing.
4. Refresh regularly.
   Recency bias is real. A regular update cycle matters more for AI visibility than it does for traditional SEO.
5. Build off-site presence deliberately.
   Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, and high-authority publications are disproportionately cited by LLMs. Genuine community participation, digital PR, and thought leadership content on these platforms extends your citation surface. This is not a quick win; it is a long-term brand-building programme.
6. Allow AI crawlers to access your site.
   Check your robots.txt file to confirm that GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), and PerplexityBot are not inadvertently blocked. If they cannot crawl your content, they cannot cite it.

How to Measure GEO Performance

GEO performance is harder to measure than SEO because AI citations do not reliably generate trackable click-through traffic. The measurement approach requires combining manual testing across AI platforms, AI-specific visibility tools, and traditional SEO metrics, none of which alone gives you the full picture.

Why traditional analytics undercount AI impact

When ChatGPT or Perplexity recommends a brand, the resulting website visit often appears in direct traffic or branded search rather than as a referral from an AI platform. AI referral traffic is a real but currently small signal. According to Semrush data from 2025, visitors arriving from LLM platforms convert at 4.4 times the rate of organic visitors, but volume remains low relative to traditional organic search. The conversion quality is there; the scale is not yet.

Manual testing as the baseline

The simplest and cheapest starting point is running your 20 to 30 priority queries in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini on a monthly basis. Record whether your brand appears, in what context, and with what sentiment. This costs nothing and gives you directional data that no tool can replicate exactly, because AI responses vary by query phrasing, location, and platform.

AI visibility tools

For more systematic tracking, dedicated tools now exist for monitoring citation frequency, share of voice, and brand sentiment across AI platforms. Options include Ahrefs Brand Radar, Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, and Otterly.ai. Roar’s own AI visibility benchmarking tool provides both the diagnosis and a prioritised action plan.

The KPIs that matter

• AI citation frequency: how often your brand appears in AI-generated responses for your priority queries
• Share of voice: your brand mentions as a proportion of total brand mentions across those same queries, relative to competitors
• Sentiment:whether your brand is referenced positively, neutrally, or negatively
• Branded search uplift:a downstream proxy for AI-influenced discovery, trackable in Google Search Console
• AI-referred sessions in GA4:direct referral traffic from AI platforms, where trackable

What not to obsess over

Citation volatility is real. Between 40% and 60% of cited sources change month-to-month across AI Mode and ChatGPT, according to Semrush research from 2025. Optimising for individual prompt appearances is a losing game. Build for consistent authority across a topic area and the citations follow.

GEO is real. The shift in how people find information is real. And the brands showing up consistently in AI-generated answers are, almost without exception, the ones that were already doing strong SEO before AI search became a boardroom talking point.

The mystification of GEO as a distinct technical black box has served vendors more than it has served marketers. The practical answer is to rank well, write clearly, back your claims with data, and build your reputation beyond your own website. Those things were always good SEO. They are now also good GEO.

• Rank in Google first. Most AI platforms retrieve content through Google’s index.
• Structure content for passage-level extraction. Self-contained, front-loaded answers get cited.
• Add verifiable data and source attribution. It is the single highest-impact content change the evidence supports.

If you want to understand where your brand currently stands in AI search, and what it would take to improve your visibility, Roar’s AI Search Optimisation service andAI visibility benchmarking tool give you both the diagnosis and the strategy. Explore moresearch and AI insights on the Roar blog.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is GEO a real thing?

Yes. The shift toward AI-generated search responses is measurable and accelerating. Google AI Overviews now appear on a significant proportion of searches, and platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity are generating billions of queries monthly. Whether GEO deserves its own label is debatable, but the underlying challenge, ensuring your brand is visible when AI systems generate answers in your category, is real and worth addressing.

Can a beginner do GEO?

Yes, and the starting point is the same as it is for SEO. Get your technical foundations right, create content that answers your audience’s questions directly and thoroughly, build your site’s authority over time, and ensure AI crawlers can access your content. The GEO-specific additions, adding statistics, citing sources, and building off-site presence, are improvements any practitioner can implement without specialist tooling.

Is SEO being replaced by AI?

No. Traditional organic search still drives vastly more traffic than AI platforms. According to Ahrefs data from 2025, Google sends approximately 345 times more traffic to websites than ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity combined. More importantly, most AI platforms retrieve live content by searching Google. Strong SEO remains the foundation of AI visibility. The relationship is additive, not competitive.

What are the four steps of SEO?

The core pillars of SEO are: technical optimisation (ensuring your site is crawlable, fast, and correctly structured), on-page optimisation (creating relevant, well-structured content that matches search intent), authority building (earning backlinks and brand mentions from credible sources), and performance measurement (tracking rankings, traffic, and conversions to refine the strategy). These four pillars are also the foundation of effective GEO.

Which is better, SEO or GEO?

Neither replaces the other, and framing it as a choice misses the point. SEO is the prerequisite for GEO. Without strong organic rankings and a technically sound site, most AI platforms will not retrieve your content in the first place. GEO adds targeted improvements to how your content is structured and how your brand is represented off-site. Invest in SEO first. GEO follows naturally from doing it well.

What is Google Search Generative Experience (SGE)?

Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) was the name given to Google’s AI-powered search experiment, launched in 2023. It has since become Google AI Overviews, rolled out globally from May 2024. AI Overviews appear above traditional organic results for a growing range of queries and synthesise answers from multiple indexed sources. They are the most SEO-correlated of all AI citation surfaces, with Ahrefs data from July 2025 finding that 76.1% of cited URLs also ranked in Google’s top 10.

Do I need to block AI crawlers from my site?

Only if you have a specific commercial reason to do so. AI crawlers such as GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), and PerplexityBot need access to your content to potentially cite it. Blocking them in robots.txt removes you from the retrieval pool for those platforms. Most businesses benefit from allowing access. Check your robots.txt file to confirm you are not inadvertently blocking AI crawlers.