What is generative engine optimization? It is the work of making your content easy for AI answer engines, such as Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT search and Perplexity, to find, trust and cite. The buyer gets one written answer with a few sources instead of ten links, and your company is either in that answer or it is not.
This guide covers a plain definition, GEO vs SEO side by side, what the original research found and its limits, and a checklist for a B2B IT or SaaS website.
What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of shaping your content so that AI systems which write answers from web sources choose it, quote it and link to it. The paper that coined the term describes it as a new paradigm where content creators aim to increase their visibility in generative engine responses.
That paper is GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Pranjal Aggarwal and five co-authors, including researchers from Princeton University and IIT Delhi, published at KDD 2024. It calls systems such as Bing Chat, Google's Search Generative Experience and Perplexity generative engines: tools that retrieve sources and have a language model write one answer from them.
The unit of success changes. In classic search it is a ranked page; in an AI answer it is a passage that the engine lifts, blends with other sources and may or may not link. The paper measured visibility that way, by how much of the answer is attributed to your source and how early it appears.
GEO vs SEO: what changes and what stays the same
GEO does not replace SEO. It builds on it and moves the finish line. Google's guide to AI features and your website says SEO best practices remain relevant for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that there are no additional requirements to appear in them.
What changes is who reads your site: ChatGPT search and Perplexity run their own crawlers, and AI answers reward passages that make sense on their own.
| Aspect | SEO | GEO | What stays the same |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank a page in the results | Be cited or named in the answer | The best answer wins |
| Unit of work | The page | The passage | Clear headings and structure |
| Who reads it | Googlebot and people | Googlebot, AI search crawlers and people | Content must be crawlable text |
| What helps | Relevance, links, technical health | Sources, statistics, quotations, clear writing | Keyword stuffing does not work |
| Main metric | Rankings, clicks, impressions | Share of answers that cite or name you | Pipeline is the real test |
The overlap is larger than most GEO pitches admit. If your pages are not indexed, crawlable and useful, no GEO tactic will rescue them. Before you spend on GEO, our SEO audit checklist for B2B IT websites shows how to check indexing, canonicals and hreflang on your key pages.
How do AI answer engines choose their sources?
Most AI answers are built in three steps. Products differ in the details, but the pattern explains nearly every GEO tactic.
- The question is expanded. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use a query fan-out technique, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources. The GEO paper describes the same step: a model rewrites the query into simpler searches.
- Pages are retrieved from an index. To appear as a supporting link in Google's AI features, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. For ChatGPT search, OpenAI uses its OAI-SearchBot crawler to surface websites, and Perplexity uses PerplexityBot.
- An answer is written and cited. A language model condenses the retrieved pages into one answer and attributes parts of it to specific sources. A clear, checkable statement is easier to attribute than one that circles the point.
If you are not in the retrieval set, nothing else matters, so crawl access and search visibility come first. And because the engine runs searches you never targeted, such as pricing, integrations or alternatives, you need pages that answer those too. How AI chatbots now build B2B shortlists shows this from the buyer's side.
Google also notes that AI Overviews often do not trigger, and that AI Mode and AI Overviews may show different links, so one answer on one day proves little.
What did the GEO research actually find?
The authors built GEO-bench, a benchmark of 10,000 queries, and tested nine ways of rewriting a source. The headline claim in the abstract is that GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses.
That figure is a ceiling, not an average. The three best methods, citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics, achieved a relative improvement of 30 to 40% on the paper's position-adjusted word count metric and 15 to 30% on its subjective impression metric.
| Method | What it changes | Result in the paper |
|---|---|---|
| Quotation Addition | Adds quotes from credible sources | One of the top three; 22% above baseline on Perplexity |
| Statistics Addition | Swaps vague claims for numbers | One of the top three |
| Cite Sources | Adds citations to reliable sources | One of the top three; strong in combination |
| Fluency, Easy-to-Understand | Clearer, simpler wording | 15 to 30% gain |
| Authoritative | More persuasive tone | No significant improvement |
| Keyword Stuffing | More keywords from the query | Little to no improvement; 10% worse on Perplexity |
Three details matter more than the headline. Gains were largest for pages that ranked lower in the underlying search results: citing sources raised visibility by 115.1% for sources ranked fifth, while the visibility of the top-ranked source fell by 30.3% on average. That is good news for smaller specialists. Results also varied by domain, and the main test engine used GPT-3.5 Turbo over the top five Google results, plus a second test on Perplexity with improvements of up to 37%.
The authors did not measure effects on search rankings, and they note that methods may need to adapt as engines change. Read the paper as evidence about direction: specific, sourced, clearly written content gets used more. It is not a promise of 40% more leads.
How to optimize a B2B website for generative engines: a checklist
Run this checklist on your ten most important pages first: home, pricing, the main service or product pages and your best comparison content.
- Open the door to the right crawlers. Allow Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot in robots.txt and make sure your CDN or firewall does not block them; Google's checklist names the CDN explicitly. OpenAI and Perplexity both recommend allowing their search crawlers if you want to appear in their results.
- Keep important content in text, not locked in images, videos or widgets that need scripts to render. Google recommends this too.
- Define terms and answer first. Give each key concept a one or two sentence definition, open every section with the direct answer and phrase headings the way buyers ask.
- Add statistics with named sources. Replace 'fast onboarding' with the real number and where it comes from.
- Quote real people with name and role: your engineers, analysts or customers who agreed to be quoted. Never invent a quote or a figure.
- Publish comparison and pricing pages. Buyers ask AI tools about alternatives and costs. If you hide your prices, the answer is built from somebody else's page, which is why we publish ours on our pricing page.
- Keep company facts consistent everywhere. Use the same name, description, services and locations on your site, LinkedIn, directories and partner pages, and add Organization structured data linking to those profiles.
- Earn third-party reviews and mentions. Review platforms, industry directories, partner listings and articles by others are among the pages an engine can retrieve, and they are where buyers check your claims.
Do you need llms.txt or special schema markup for GEO?
Not for Google. Its documentation says you don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that there is no special schema.org structured data you need to add.
llms.txt is a proposal by Jeremy Howard, first published in September 2024 and revised in August 2026, for a markdown file at /llms.txt that gives language models a short, curated guide to a site. By the proposal's own account, these files are used most heavily for software documentation, where coding agents follow them to find API references and tutorials.
So treat it as optional: useful for a developer product with public docs, cheap to add elsewhere, but unlikely to change your AI visibility on its own.
Structured data is still worth doing. Schema.org provides the shared vocabulary, and its sameAs property points to a page that unambiguously indicates an entity's identity. Google says Organization structured data can help it understand your administrative details and disambiguate your company in search results. Keep the markup consistent with the visible text on the page.
How to measure generative engine optimization
No single number shows whether GEO works, so review these four views every month.
- Search Console. Google counts sites appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode in your overall search traffic, reported in the Performance report under the Web search type. Watch the pages you changed.
- A fixed prompt panel. Twenty buyer questions, asked in several assistants and several times each, recording your mention rate and the cited pages. The method is in how to tell if ChatGPT recommends your company.
- Server logs. Confirm that OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot reach your key pages without blocks or errors.
- Pipeline. Tag referrals from AI assistants in your analytics and ask new leads where they first heard of you. A mention that never turns into a meeting is worth little.
Google also says that clicks from result pages with AI Overviews are higher quality, meaning people are more likely to spend more time on the site. Check that against your own data, and size the budget with what a B2B IT company should spend on marketing.
GEO mistakes to avoid
The quickest way to waste a GEO budget is to repeat old SEO tricks or build a second website for machines.
- Keyword stuffing. It gave little to no improvement in the paper and scored 10% below the baseline on Perplexity. Google's spam policies define it as filling a page with keywords or numbers to manipulate rankings.
- Separate content for machines. Showing crawlers something different from what people see is cloaking, which Google defines as presenting different content to users and search engines to manipulate rankings and mislead users. Hidden text meant only for machines can also fall under Google's hidden text abuse policy.
- Mass-produced AI pages. Google lists using generative AI tools to generate many pages without adding value for users as an example of scaled content abuse.
- Invented numbers and quotes. They signal evidence only until a buyer checks them.
- Blocking the crawler you want citations from. Blocking GPTBot is a decision about model training. Blocking OAI-SearchBot keeps you out of ChatGPT search answers, apart from navigational links.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between GEO and SEO?
SEO aims to rank a page in a list of search results. GEO aims to get your content cited or named inside an answer that an AI system writes from several sources. Both need crawlable, indexed and useful pages. GEO puts extra weight on self-contained passages, sourced statistics, quotations and consistent company facts, and success is measured by how often answers use you.
Should I block GPTBot?
That is a separate choice from AI search visibility. OpenAI says GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train its generative AI foundation models, while OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in ChatGPT search. The two settings are independent, so you can disallow GPTBot and still allow OAI-SearchBot. Blocking OAI-SearchBot is what keeps you out of ChatGPT search answers.
How long does generative engine optimization take to work?
Plan in months, not days. OpenAI and Perplexity both say robots.txt changes can take up to about 24 hours to be reflected, but new or rewritten pages still have to be crawled, indexed and chosen for answers. Google notes that crawling can take anywhere from several days to several months. Measure monthly with the same prompt panel and judge the trend, not a single answer.
Get your company into AI answers
Start with the checklist on your ten most important pages and a monthly prompt panel. If you would rather hand it to a team, GEO is part of our SEO and AI visibility service for B2B IT and SaaS companies.
Our published marketing plans are on marketing pricing, and AI visibility works best inside a wider digital marketing program. If you also want qualified meetings from outbound, our Sales Engine plans start at 1,750 euros a month with 5 qualified meetings a month guaranteed; see our pricing page.
Sources and further reading: Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024 paper; Google Search Central, AI features and your website; Google Search Central, spam policies; Google Search Central, Organization structured data; OpenAI, overview of OpenAI crawlers; Perplexity, Perplexity crawlers; llmstxt.org, the llms.txt proposal; Schema.org, sameAs property.