GEO (generative engine optimization) is the practice of making your brand and your pages more likely to be named, quoted and cited when AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews write an answer. In practice, GEO decides whether an AI reply quotes your page, links to it, or names your product when a buyer asks for a recommendation.
A generative engine is a search tool that writes one reply from several sources in place of a list of links. Google AI Overviews are one kind: short AI summaries that appear above the regular links on some Google searches. This page uses GEO in that marketing and search sense.
GEO full form
The GEO full form in digital marketing and SEO is generative engine optimization, sometimes written generative engine optimisation. It means shaping your content, your site access and your presence on other websites so AI-written answers include your brand.
GEO means other things outside marketing. In space and telecom, GEO is geostationary Earth orbit, about 36,000 km above the equator, where many communication satellites sit. In everyday use, geo is short for geographic or geolocation. On this page GEO always means generative engine optimization.
Where does the term GEO come from?
The term comes from the research paper GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Pranjal Aggarwal and five co-authors. It was first posted on arXiv on 16 November 2023 and accepted at KDD 2024, a data science conference.
The paper built GEO-bench, a test set of user questions from many subject areas with web sources for each. It then measured how edits to a source page changed that page's visibility in the generated answer. It reports visibility gains of up to 40%, and found that the edits that worked best differed from one subject area to another.
For a brand, that last finding matters most. A tactic that helped in one topic may do little in yours, so test each change in your own category and measure it there.
How does GEO work?
GEO targets the steps a generative engine takes to build an answer. First the engine interprets the question. Then it runs one or more searches, keeps a small set of pages, and writes a reply that names brands and links a few of them. A page or brand that fails any step is missing from the reply.
- Searching. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode, its conversational search option, may issue several related searches across subtopics and data sources to build one response. Google calls this query fan-out (Google Search Central). A page can be found through any of those searches.
- Access. For Google's AI features, a page needs to be indexed (kept in Google's database of pages it can show) and eligible to appear with a snippet (the preview text under a result), with no extra requirements. On ChatGPT, a site that blocks OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot crawler will not appear in search answers, according to OpenAI's crawler docs. Sites set this in robots.txt, a plain text file at the root of a domain that tells each bot what it may read.
- Choosing passages. The GEO paper tested page edits in a controlled setup. Adding citations, quotations and statistics raised a page's visibility in AI answers by up to about 40% in a GPT-3.5 test setup (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024). Live engines may weigh pages differently.
- Describing brands. Brand descriptions come from whatever the engine read about the brand: its own pages, marketplace listings, reviews, lists and forums.
How GEO relates to SEO
SEO works on where your page ranks among search results, and success shows up as rankings and clicks. GEO works on what the AI reply says and links to, and success shows up as brand mentions, order in the reply and citations.
GEO still leans on SEO. Google only shows pages that meet normal Search requirements as links in its AI features, so pages Google cannot index cannot be cited there. GEO vs SEO covers the differences in detail, and LLM SEO explains another name people use for this work.
How GEO relates to AEO
AEO (answer engine optimization) is the label many SEO and marketing teams use for the goal of being included in AI-written answers. GEO is the label the 2023 paper introduced. Both lead to the checklist further down this page.
Read what AEO means, or see AEO vs GEO vs SEO for all three terms side by side.
An example: a sunscreen question in English and Hinglish
Take a buyer in India choosing a sunscreen. In English: "I want to buy a sunscreen that doesn't leave a white cast on Indian skin. Which one is best?" In Hinglish, Hindi-English typed in English letters: "Mujhe aisa sunscreen kharidna hai jo Indian skin par white cast na chhode. Konsa best hai?"
A generative engine answers each version with a few sunscreen brands, a reason for each, and usually links to the pages it drew from. Those links show which websites shaped the answer: beauty publications, marketplaces, review pages or brand sites.
Asking in Hinglish can send the engine to different sites. Depra's Hinglish study put this sunscreen question and nine other buying questions to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity from India, in English and Hinglish, 8 times each, for 480 answers in total. Perplexity linked sources in every answer in both languages, yet the websites it cited moved: the sites cited in two runs of the same question overlapped 85.2%, and the sites cited in the English and Hinglish versions overlapped 52.8%.
The GEO work for a sunscreen brand: track both versions, list the pages cited in each, get the product covered on sites that show up in only one language, and make its own product page state white cast and skin type near the top.
Perplexity's cited websites overlapped 32.4 points less between the English and Hinglish versions of a question than between two runs of the same version. (Depra Hinglish study, fieldwork 14 Aug 2026)
GEO checklist: 8 steps
A GEO checklist moves from the questions you care about, to changes on your site and elsewhere, to a measurement you repeat. Work through these 8 steps in order.
- Pick the questions that matter. Choose 20 to 40 buying questions for your category that do not name your brand. For India, write each one in English and Hinglish.
- Get a baseline from several runs. AI answers vary between runs of the same question. Ask each one several times per engine and record whether you were named.
- Open your site to AI crawlers. Allow the crawlers that fetch pages for answers, such as OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, and make sure your key pages are indexed in Google. The guide to AI crawlers explains which bots do what.
- Lead with the answer. Start each section with a short, direct answer to one question, under a heading written in the buyer's words.
- Add citations, quotes and statistics. These are the edits the GEO paper tested. Use numbers you can source, and name the source on the page.
- Match your brand facts across the web. Make product names, prices, sizes and category descriptions agree on your site, marketplaces and profiles.
- Earn a place on cited sites. Find the pages engines cite when they recommend your competitors, then pitch, list or get reviewed on them. Citation gap analysis lists those sites for you.
- Re-measure on a fixed schedule. Compare the same questions period by period, per engine and per language, before you decide what worked.
How do you measure GEO?
You measure GEO by running a fixed list of buying questions through each engine on a schedule and reading the replies for five signals.
- Mention rate: out of all replies, how many include your brand. Depra calls this AI visibility.
- Rank in the reply: your place among the brands when a reply lists more than one.
- Tone: positive, neutral or negative, with the sentence from the reply that shows it.
- Citations: the exact pages each reply links to, including any of your own.
- Source mix: the kinds of sites that get cited, such as editorial, marketplace, forum or brand sites, so you know where to get covered.
Measuring GEO with Depra
Depra's AI visibility tracking runs your questions in English and Hinglish through ChatGPT with web search, Gemini and Google AI Overviews daily, and through Perplexity weekly, asked from inside the country you pick. Each full reply is saved with the brands it named and the sites it cited, for you and your competitors. Branded questions, the ones that already include your name, do not count toward your scores. Your report shows each engine's visibility with a confidence range, the band the true figure most likely sits in.
Before you edit pages, check that AI bots can reach them: the AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt rules for 41 AI crawlers. For a side-by-side of software built for this, see the best GEO tools.