What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?

Short answer: generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of getting a company named, and described correctly, in answers from AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot. The term comes from a 2024 research paper. In practice it means improving your own pages and, just as important, the third-party sources those tools rely on.

Where the term comes from

"Generative engine optimization" was coined by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues in a research paper presented at KDD 2024, the ACM conference on knowledge discovery and data mining. They built a benchmark of search questions, had an AI system answer each one from a set of web sources, and measured how visible each source was in the answer after rewriting it in different ways.

Their main finding: adding quotations, statistics and citations of credible sources to a page made it noticeably more visible in generated answers, with relative gains of roughly 30 to 40 percent on their benchmark, and fluent, readable writing also helped. Classic keyword stuffing did not help and sometimes hurt.

Two caveats matter. The "engine" in most experiments was a simulated one built from search results and a language model, and most questions were informational, not "which vendor should I buy". The paper is a good guide to how answers are assembled, not a recipe for B2B vendor lists.

How AI tools decide what to say

When an AI tool answers with live search, it runs one or more web searches, reads a handful of pages, and writes an answer from them. Two things follow:

• If a page is not retrieved, it cannot be cited. Being crawlable and indexed by the search systems these tools use is the floor.
• Third-party pages carry most of the weight. A 2025 study of AI search found that for software questions, about three quarters of the sources AI search cited were earned media (reviews, articles, directories), far more than in Google's own results.

That matches what marketers see: an Ahrefs study across 75,000 brands found that how often a brand is mentioned around the web correlated much more strongly with appearing in Google's AI Overviews than backlinks did. Correlation is not proof, but the direction is consistent.

Why it matters for B2B companies

B2B buyers increasingly shortlist vendors before talking to anyone. 6sense's 2025 buyer research reports that most buyers now use AI tools during the purchase and that the large majority of deals go to a vendor on the buyer's first shortlist. If AI tools leave you off that list, or describe your product wrongly, you lose deals you never see.

What GEO work involves

1. Measure. Ask the questions your buyers ask, many times on each tool, and record who is named, what is said and which sources are cited. AI answers vary a lot between runs (SparkToro found the same brand list repeated less than 1 time in 100), so count appearances across many runs rather than trusting one answer.
2. Fix your own pages. Clear comparison, pricing, integration and use-case pages with specific facts, written so an AI can quote them accurately, and reachable by AI crawlers.
3. Fix the sources. Correct outdated reviews and directory listings, and earn accurate coverage in the comparison articles and roundups AI cites for your category.
4. Remeasure. Re-ask exactly the same questions and report what moved and what didn't.

What GEO is not

• Not a special file or tag. Google says its AI features need no special markup or AI text files beyond normal Search eligibility.
• Not a guarantee. No one controls what these tools say. Anyone promising a guaranteed mention is overselling.
• Not fake mentions. Planted reviews and undisclosed forum posts break platform rules and tend to be filtered out.

For how GEO differs from search engine optimization, see GEO vs SEO. For a practical checklist, see how to get your company mentioned in ChatGPT. Our own measurement protocol is on the methodology page.