AI search
Generative engine optimization (GEO)
Work aimed at getting a business named or cited in answers written by AI assistants. The name comes from a 2023 research paper; AEO and LLMO are other labels for the same thing.
The term comes from a paper by researchers at Princeton and other universities, first posted in November 2023 and presented at KDD in 2024. On the authors' simulated engine, adding citations, quotations and statistics to a page raised how much of the answer drew on it, by up to 40%, and stuffing in keywords made it worse.
That result has not held up well. C-SEO Bench, a benchmark accepted at NeurIPS in 2025, re-tested rewrites like these with newer models across several kinds of question and found most of them largely ineffective and often harmful. What helped more was ranking higher in the results the model read.
So in practice GEO is mostly SEO plus a few additions: let each assistant's search crawler in, publish the page that answers the question, and get mentioned on the pages assistants already cite. Google's own guide says optimizing for its generative AI features is still SEO, and lists "chunking" content and llms.txt among the tactics you can ignore. In our reading, no published evidence supports a GEO trick that works on its own. We sell GEO software ourselves, so weigh this accordingly.