GEO vs SEO: what generative engine optimization actually changes

GEO, short for generative engine optimization, means making your content more likely to be used and cited in AI-generated answers: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews. The term comes from a research paper by Aggarwal and colleagues, published at KDD 2024. You will also see AEO (answer engine optimization) and LLMO. They describe roughly the same work.

The short version: GEO is mostly good SEO, plus a handful of AI-specific checks. Anyone selling it as a completely new discipline is overselling it.

What stays the same

Google is unusually direct about this. Its documentation on AI features says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, no special optimizations, no special schema.org markup and no new machine-readable files required. The best practices it lists are the familiar ones: allow crawling in robots.txt and at your CDN, make important content available as text, and keep structured data consistent with what's visible on the page.

Many assistants also build on a search index rather than reading the web from scratch. ChatGPT search relies on OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot crawler, and Google describes grounding Gemini with content from the Google Search index. Pages that are crawlable, indexable and genuinely useful have a head start everywhere.

What actually changes

• You compete as a passage, not a page. Microsoft's guidance says assistants like Copilot break content into smaller pieces and evaluate those for relevance and authority before assembling an answer. Clear headings, self-contained sections and direct question-and-answer pairs are easier to lift.
• There are more crawlers to let in. OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot each decide whether their assistant can cite you, and many AI crawlers read raw HTML without running JavaScript. See the AI crawler list.
• Success is a mention, not a rank. There's no position 1 in a chat answer. You measure how often you're named and cited across a set of prompts, and how much traffic follows. See how to check if ChatGPT mentions your brand.
• Training data matters too. When an assistant answers without searching, it relies on what the model learned in training. What other sites say about you, and whether you let training crawlers in, shapes that. See should you block GPTBot?
• Agents read machine-readable extras. llms.txt, an OpenAPI spec or an MCP server help AI agents and coding tools understand and use your product. Google says it doesn't need them for its AI features; they are cheap additions for other readers, not ranking levers.

What the GEO research actually found

The GEO paper built a benchmark of queries and tested rewriting a source page in different ways. It reports that the best methods, adding quotations from relevant sources, adding statistics and citing sources, improved the source's visibility in generated answers by up to about 40%, while keyword stuffing, a classic SEO trick, did not help. The authors also found that what works varies by domain.

Read that carefully. The main experiments used a simulated engine (gpt-3.5-turbo summarizing the top five Google results), with an additional test on Perplexity. It's good evidence that specific, well-sourced, quotable content gets used more. It isn't a promise that any particular edit will get you into ChatGPT.

A practical GEO checklist

• Let AI search bots in, and check your CDN's bot settings too. Test it with the AI crawler checker.
• Server-render key pages so the product, audience and price are in the HTML.
• Answer real buyer questions in plain text: pricing, comparisons, alternatives, use cases. The FAQ generator adds matching FAQPage markup.
• Back claims with specifics: numbers, sources, named customers or integrations. That's what the GEO research rewarded.
• Describe your organization and product with JSON-LD. See schema markup for SaaS and the schema generator.
• Publish an llms.txt for agents with the llms.txt generator.
• Earn mentions on the sites assistants cite: review sites, comparison articles, communities, docs and GitHub.
• Measure mentions and AI referral traffic. See tracking AI traffic in GA4.

Where most sites stand

In our State of AI Visibility 2026 study of 538 SaaS and AI homepages, crawler access was mostly fine: only 0.6% blocked an AI search bot. The gaps were in the AI-specific layer: 70.8% had no question-and-answer content, 38.1% had no product or organization schema and 35.5% had no llms.txt.