Generative engine optimization (GEO)

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of getting your website into the answers of AI tools. Ask ChatGPT for a plumber who does emergency repairs in your town and it writes an answer with links to a few sources; Google's AI Overviews do the same in the search results. GEO means making your pages easy for such tools to find and quote, so yours is among those links.

Where does the term come from?

From a 2023 paper by Aggarwal et al. (Princeton University and IIT Delhi), presented at the KDD conference in August 2024. They call AI search tools that collect web pages and summarise them with a large language model generative engines, a form of RAG. GEO is their name for making a source more visible in such answers. They tested nine ways of rewriting a web page on GEO-bench, a set of 10,000 search questions, and measured how much of each answer came from the rewritten page and how high up.

What helped in the research?

• Adding sources, quotations and figures. These three rewrites made a page 30 to 40% more visible in the answers of the researchers' test engine, and up to 37% more on Perplexity, a real AI search engine.
• Clearer writing. Easier and more fluent text gave 15 to 30%.
• Keyword stuffing, a classic SEO trick, did not help. On Perplexity it scored 10% worse than leaving the page alone.
• Lower-ranked sites gained most. Adding citations raised the visibility of pages in fifth place in the ordinary search results by 115%; for the top-ranked page the same change lowered it by 30% on average.

These tests date from 2023. The test engine had GPT-3.5 summarise the top five Google results, and AI search tools have changed since, so treat the figures as a direction.

What do Google and OpenAI say?

In the Netherlands, Google has shown AI Overviews in Dutch since May 2025 and AI Mode since October 2025. According to Google's guide for site owners (September 2026), these features have no extra requirements. A page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet. The usual basics apply: allow crawling in robots.txt, put important content in text, keep structured data in line with the visible text, and keep your Business Profile and Merchant Center details up to date. Special AI text files or schema.org markup are not needed.

ChatGPT's search finds sites through OpenAI's crawler OAI-SearchBot. Sites that block it in robots.txt do not appear in its search answers; blocking GPTBot only tells OpenAI not to use the content for training (OpenAI).

Where does it go wrong?

• Being quoted is not the same as being visited. In a Pew Research Center study of 900 American adults (March 2025), people clicked a regular search result on 8% of visits to Google results pages with an AI summary and on 15% of visits without one. They clicked a link inside the summary on 1% of those visits. Google says that clicks from pages with AI Overviews are of higher quality.
• Nothing is guaranteed. Google shows AI Overviews only when it judges them useful, and a page that meets every requirement may still not be crawled, indexed or shown.

Example

Suppose a plumber has a page about emergency repairs. A version written with GEO in mind states the call-out fee and the towns it serves in plain text instead of in an image, and backs a claim with a source, such as the standard its installations meet. The company keeps its Google Business Profile up to date, and its robots.txt lets both Googlebot and OAI-SearchBot in. Visits from AI Overviews and AI Mode show up in Google Search Console under the normal web results.