AI search
What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?
Many buyers now ask an assistant before they search, and some never search at all. This guide explains what GEO is, how an AI answer gets built, and what decides whether your business is in it.
What does GEO mean in plain terms?
GEO is the work of getting your business into the answers AI assistants write. Someone asks ChatGPT for a good orthodontist in their city, or asks Gemini which CRM handles WhatsApp leads. The assistant names a few options and sometimes links to its sources. GEO is everything you do so that your business is one of those options, and so that what the assistant says about you is true.
The name comes from a 2023 research paper titled “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”. You will also hear AEO (answer engine optimization), AI SEO and LLM optimization. The labels differ. The work is the same.
GEO sits on top of search engine optimization. The assistants that cite sources mostly find them by running searches, so a site that search engines cannot read is invisible to them as well.
Where does an AI assistant get its answer?
From two places. The difference decides what you can change.
The first is what the model learned in training: a very large snapshot of text, frozen at a cutoff date. If your business was described often and consistently before that date, the model may know about you without searching. You cannot edit that memory. You can only influence the next snapshot, slowly, by being mentioned in the right places.
The second is live retrieval. For many questions, especially local, recent or commercial ones, the assistant runs searches, reads a handful of pages and writes its answer from them, often with links. Google says its AI Overviews and AI Mode may run several related searches across subtopics to build one response, a method it calls query fan-out (Google Search Central). A page can therefore be picked up for one small part of a bigger question.
Retrieval is where GEO work pays off first, because the assistant reads your pages as they are today.
What you can change, and how fast it moves
Each source behind an answer responds to different work. This is roughly the order to tackle them in.
| Source behind the answer | What you can change | How fast it moves |
|---|---|---|
| The search indexes assistants query | Let the crawlers in, get key pages indexed in Google and Bing, fix technical errors | Days to weeks, after a recrawl |
| Your own pages | Answer the main question in the first lines, state facts as text, keep one topic per page | Weeks, once the pages are read again |
| Structured data | Organisation, local business, service and FAQ markup that matches what the page shows | Weeks |
| Other websites | Directory listings, reviews, press, partner pages and comparisons that describe you correctly | Months |
| The model’s training data | Nothing directly. Consistent mentions over time feed later versions | Slow, and outside anyone’s control |
What makes a page easy for an assistant to quote?
Assistants lift sentences. A page whose answer sits in the fourth paragraph, after the founder’s story, gives them nothing clean to take. A page that opens with the answer does.
Try this on your most important page. Could a stranger copy one paragraph from it and have a correct, complete answer to the question the page is about? If not, rewrite that paragraph before anything else.
- The answer to the page’s main question in its first two sentences
- Specifics written as text: services, areas served, opening hours, price ranges or what drives the price
- The same business name, address and phone number as on your Google Business Profile and directories
- Headings phrased the way people ask the question
- No key facts hidden in images, PDFs or panels that only load on click
- A named business or author behind the page, and a date wherever the facts can change
Why do other websites matter so much?
Assistants cross-check. A claim that appears only on your own site is weak, because every business says good things about itself. The same fact repeated in a directory listing, in reviews and in a local press article is much harder to ignore.
Contradictions work against you. If an old address still sits on three directories, an assistant may repeat it to a patient who then drives to the wrong street. Part of GEO is plain housekeeping: finding the wrong facts about you and getting them corrected where they are published.
The rest is earning new mentions on the sites assistants already cite in your field. That takes longer, and it is the part of the work most worth checking for honesty when you hire someone.
How to start with GEO this month
Write down the buying questions
List the questions a customer asks before choosing a business like yours, in each language you sell in. Twenty is enough to start. Keep the ones with a city, a price or a comparison in them.
Ask the assistants
Put each question to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, and look at Google’s AI Overview. Record whether you are named, whether you are linked, and whether what is said is accurate.
Check crawler access
Open your robots.txt and make sure you are not blocking the crawlers that feed answers, such as OAI-SearchBot, Googlebot and Bingbot. Our guide on appearing in ChatGPT answers goes through them.
Fix the pages that should answer
For each question you lost, find the page that should have won and rewrite its opening so it answers the question directly.
Clean up your listings
Make your name, address, phone, hours and categories identical on your site, your Google Business Profile and every directory you can edit.
Measure visits and leads
Tag traffic from assistants in your analytics and follow it to the form or the call. Our guide to tracking AI traffic shows the setup.
Frequently asked questions
Is GEO the same as AEO or AI SEO?
For practical purposes, yes. AEO, AI SEO and LLM optimization all describe the same goal: being the business an AI answer names and cites. Use whichever term your team understands, and judge the work by the answers and leads it changes.
Does GEO replace SEO?
No. Assistants that cite sources usually find them through a search index, so SEO stays the foundation. GEO adds the work of making your facts quotable and consistent across the web. Our article on GEO vs SEO sets out what changes and what stays the same.
Do I need an llms.txt file for GEO?
It is optional. Google says you do not need new AI text files to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and support from other assistants is uneven and largely unconfirmed. Publishing one costs little. Our llms.txt guide explains when it is worth doing.
How long before GEO shows results?
Fixes to your own pages and to crawler access can show within weeks, once assistants read the pages again. New mentions on other sites take months. What a model knows without searching changes more slowly still, and nobody controls it directly.
Is GEO worth it for a small local business?
Often, yes. Local questions such as “which dentist near me is open on Saturday” tend to be answered from a short list of sources: your Google Business Profile, your reviews and your site. Our local SEO checklist covers those first.
Can an agency guarantee I will appear in ChatGPT?
No. The model writes the answer, and it changes with the question, the person asking and the day. A serious GEO service commits to the work, and shows you each month what changed in the answers.
Last updated · By the Napexy team