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

“Generative engine optimization”, or GEO, is the name people now use for getting your business mentioned in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews. You'll also see it called AEO (answer engine optimization) or LLM SEO. They mean roughly the same thing.

Where the term comes from

The name comes from a 2023 research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, by researchers at Princeton University and IIT Delhi. They built a benchmark of search questions, rewrote source pages in different ways, and measured how often an AI answer engine used each version.

Their headline result was that some changes could raise a page's visibility in the generated answers by up to 40% on their benchmark. The changes that worked best were adding citations to sources, adding quotations and adding statistics. Keyword stuffing, the old SEO trick, didn't help. They also found that what works varies by topic.

Two caveats matter. It was a controlled experiment on a research benchmark, not a study of ChatGPT recommending plumbers. And it measured how content is used once retrieved, not whether a business gets found in the first place. Still, the direction is sensible: specific, well-sourced, factual pages are easier for a machine to quote.

GEO vs SEO

GEO isn't a replacement for SEO. It sits on top of it.

• The same foundations. AI assistants that search the web retrieve pages from search indexes. Google says its AI Overviews are built on its core ranking systems and need no special optimisation beyond normal SEO best practice. If your pages aren't indexed and readable, nothing else matters.
• A different output. SEO aims for a ranked link. GEO aims for a mention, often in a short list of two or three names, sometimes with no click at all.
• More sources count. For local businesses, assistants read your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Yelp, directories and reviews alongside your site. Your site is one source among several.
• Different questions. People ask assistants longer, more specific questions. “Dentist Boise” becomes “which dentists in Boise take Delta Dental and see kids on Saturdays?”.

What GEO looks like for a small business

Strip away the jargon and it's a short list:

1. Let the crawlers in. Check that robots.txt and your host's firewall don't block the bots that power AI search. The AI Crawler Checker does this for free.
2. State your facts as text. What you do, where, for whom, hours, prices or ranges, credentials. Not in images or PDFs.
3. Mark them up. Use the most specific schema type for your business (Dentist, Plumber, HairSalon) with your address, phone and hours. The Schema Generator writes it for you.
4. Answer the real questions. One good page per service, covering cost, process and what to expect, in your own words. That's the part the GEO research points at: specific, sourced, factual.
5. Be consistent everywhere. The same name, address, phone and hours on your site and every listing.
6. Measure it. Ask the same customer questions every month and count how often you're named. Here's a 20-minute way to do that.

What's hype

• “Secret prompts” or hidden text for AI. Content that only machines see is the kind search engines have penalised for years.
• Guaranteed ChatGPT rankings. Nobody controls what an assistant says, and answers vary between runs. Anyone guaranteeing placement is guessing.
• llms.txt as a ranking factor. It's a useful summary file, but no major AI company has committed to using it. We looked at what the data says.
• Mass-produced pages for every question. Google's guide warns against it, and thin pages rarely get cited anyway.

Where to start

Run the free crawler check, then read the guide for your trade. We've written them for dentists, plumbers, electricians, law firms, hair salons, auto repair shops and more. If you'd rather have it done for you, the AI visibility audit starts at $99.

Sources

• Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (arXiv 2311.09735)
• Google Search Central: AI features and your website
• Google Search Central: optimizing your website for generative AI features