What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of getting AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, Perplexity and Grok to mention, recommend and cite your business when people ask them questions. Where SEO aims for a ranked link, GEO aims for a place inside the answer itself.
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Why GEO exists
A growing share of buying questions now go to an AI assistant instead of a search box. The assistant reads sources, writes one answer, and usually names a short list of businesses. A buyer who gets that answer often never visits a results page at all.
That changes what winning looks like. Being tenth on a results page still earns some clicks; not being in the answer earns none.
How GEO differs from SEO
- The unit is the answer, not the ranking. You are either named, cited, or absent.
- Answers vary by engine and by how the question is phrased, so you measure across several assistants and many phrasings, not one keyword position.
- AI crawlers generally do not run JavaScript, so information that only appears after a script runs may never be read.
- Reputation off your site (reviews, directories, articles, forums) weighs heavily, because the assistants read those sources too.
The parts of a GEO program
- Measurement: ask the questions your buyers ask, without naming your brand, across the major assistants, and record who gets recommended.
- Technical access: let AI crawlers in through robots.txt, serve structured data (schema.org) and clear metadata in the HTML, and publish an llms.txt file.
- Content that answers: pages that state plainly what you do, for whom, where, and at what price, in words a model can quote.
- Off-site authority: consistent listings, reviews and mentions in the sources the assistants cite for your category.
- Accuracy: checking what the assistants say about you and correcting false claims at the source.
Where to start
Start by measuring. Pick ten questions a buyer would ask before choosing a business like yours, ask them in each assistant without your name in them, and note who is recommended. That list tells you who you are competing with in AI answers, which is often not who you compete with in search.
Then fix access before content: a blocked crawler or a page that renders empty without JavaScript makes every other improvement invisible. NextEO runs this measurement and the technical fixes for you, but the order of work is the same either way.