Traditional SEO aims to rank a page in a list of links. Generative engine optimization aims to be part of the answer when an AI system writes one. The term comes from a 2023 research paper from Princeton and other universities that tested which content changes made sources more likely to appear in AI-generated answers.
You’ll also see GEO called AI SEO, LLM optimization, or answer engine optimization. They overlap almost completely.
How AI tools pick what to say
AI assistants answer from two sources:
- What the model learned in training, from a huge snapshot of the web and other text. If your business is widely and consistently described online, the model may “know” about it.
- What it retrieves live, by running web searches and reading the pages it finds. ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude and Google’s AI features all do this, then cite the pages they used.
GEO tries to improve your position in both.
What tends to help
- Be crawlable by AI search bots. If your firewall or robots.txt blocks OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Claude’s search crawler, those tools can’t read your pages (see AI crawlers).
- Put key content in plain HTML. Many AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript.
- Answer questions directly, near the top of a section, then add detail.
- Use specific facts: prices, numbers, dates, locations, comparisons. The Princeton study found that adding statistics and quotations made sources noticeably more visible.
- Be mentioned on other trusted sites: reviews, local news, industry lists, forums. AI answers often rely on what others say about you, not just what you say.
- Keep business facts consistent everywhere, with Organization or LocalBusiness schema on your site.
A local example
Brightside Dental asks ChatGPT “who’s a good family dentist in Austin for nervous kids?” and isn’t mentioned. The practices that are named have pages specifically about anxious children, lots of reviews that mention it, and coverage on local parenting sites. Brightside’s fix isn’t a trick. It’s writing a genuinely useful page on how it handles nervous kids, collecting reviews from those families, and earning a mention or two locally.
What’s hype
Be wary of anyone promising guaranteed placement in ChatGPT, secret prompts, or special files that “force” AI to cite you. AI answers vary between runs and users, and no one controls them.
How to measure
Measure LLM citations and mentions for a fixed set of real questions, repeated over time, and compare with competitors. RankThat’s AI Visibility does this across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, giving you an ongoing view of your AI visibility.