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Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Definition
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of optimizing your content and authority so that AI answer engines — like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews — cite your brand when they generate an answer.
Why it matters
As buyers shift research into AI assistants, those assistants cite only a few sources per answer. GEO is how you become one of them — capturing demand that never reaches a traditional search result.
How it works
GEO combines crawlability, structured data, entity authority and answer-ready content so engines can retrieve, trust, extract and cite your material. With a connected CRM, those citations become tracked leads.
Related terms
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How it works
GEO in practice.
Generative engines answer a question by retrieving passages and composing them into prose. Optimising for them is therefore about being retrievable and quotable, not about ranking a document in a list.
Passage-level optimisation
The unit that gets used is a claim that survives being lifted out of its paragraph — specific, sourced and dated.
Entities over keywords
Engines resolve your brand, products and people as things with attributes. Consistent naming and markup is what keeps those attributes attached to you.
Citation without traffic
You can be the source of an answer and receive no visit, so presence is measured with prompt runs rather than sessions.
Volatility by design
Generation is probabilistic: the same prompt returns different sources between runs, so conclusions come from repeated runs, not one.
Related terms: answer engine optimisation, entity optimisation, retrieval-augmented generation, topical authority. GEO is not a replacement for SEO — it is the same foundation with retrieval in mind.
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