What is GEO (generative engine optimization)? A plain-English guide

GEO, short for generative engine optimization, is the work of making your content easy for AI systems that write answers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google's AI Overviews) to find, understand and cite. If SEO is about showing up in a list of links, GEO is about being named, quoted or linked inside the answer itself.

Where the term comes from

The term was introduced in a research paper by Pranjal Aggarwal and five co-authors, presented at the KDD 2024 conference. They built a benchmark of 10,000 queries (GEO-bench) and tested how different ways of editing a web page changed how visible it was in AI-generated answers.

What they found, in their tests:

• Some methods increased visibility by up to 40%.
• The methods that helped most were adding citations to sources, adding quotations and adding statistics.
• Keyword stuffing, the old SEO habit of repeating keywords, did not help.
• Sites that ranked lower in traditional results benefited more. For example, the "cite sources" method improved visibility by 115.1% for sources that ranked fifth.

Two caveats matter. These were experiments in a controlled benchmark, not a guarantee for any real business. And AI systems change fast, so the specific numbers won't hold forever. The direction, though, is useful: clear, specific, well-supported content tends to get cited.

What Google says

Google's position on its own AI features (AI Overviews and AI Mode) is clear. There are no additional requirements to appear in them, and no special optimization is needed. A page has to be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. Google also says you don't need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup to appear in these features.

Google's advice is the same SEO advice it has always given: make sure crawlers can reach your pages, use internal links, provide a good page experience, put important content in text, and keep structured data consistent with what's visible on the page. Google also mentions keeping your Business Profile up to date.

What about other assistants?

• ChatGPT: OpenAI says sites that opt out of its OAI-SearchBot crawler won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers.
• Perplexity: Perplexity documents PerplexityBot as the crawler for its search results.
• Copilot: Microsoft documents that Copilot grounds web answers with the Bing search service.

So in practice, GEO for a local business means: be indexed in Google and Bing, allow AI search crawlers, and make the facts about your business clear and consistent everywhere.

What about llms.txt?

llms.txt is a proposal by Jeremy Howard for a simple file at the root of a site that summarizes it for language models. Some sites publish one. Google says AI text files aren't needed for its AI features, and there is no public evidence that other assistants rank businesses based on it. We see it as a cheap extra, not a strategy.

A practical GEO checklist for local businesses

1. Your site is indexed in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
2. robots.txt allows OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot (unless you chose to block them).
3. Each main service has its own page that says what, where, for whom and how to book.
4. The questions customers ask are answered in plain text, not hidden in images.
5. Claims are specific and supported: certifications with license numbers, years in business, areas served.
6. Name, phone, address or service area match on your site, Google Business Profile and listings.
7. Structured data (LocalBusiness and FAQ) matches what the page says.
8. Every month, you ask the assistants your customers' questions and note what they say.

Sources

• Aggarwal, P., Murahari, V., Rajpurohit, T., Kalyan, A., Narasimhan, K., Deshpande, A. GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. KDD 2024. doi:10.1145/3637528.3671900
• Google Search Central, AI features and your website
• OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers
• Perplexity, Perplexity Crawlers
• Microsoft, Data, privacy, and security for web search in Microsoft Copilot
• Jeremy Howard, The /llms.txt file