What is GEO? Generative Engine Optimization explained

Where the term comes from

The term comes from a study by Aggarwal and colleagues, presented at the KDD conference in 2024. They rewrote source texts and looked at what a generative search engine did with them.

Citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics produced 30 to 40 percent more visibility, measured as Position-Adjusted Word Count. That measure looks at how much of the answer comes from your text and how high up it appears. Keyword stuffing, the old SEO trick, did not perform well.

The experiment ran on rewritten texts and not on real websites, and the effect differed per domain. Treat those percentages as a direction, not as a promise.

What an AI search engine does with your page

Google describes how AI Overviews and AI Mode can work out a question through several related searches on subtopics. This is called query fan-out. Your page can then appear as a supporting link, provided it is indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet in Search.

Our rule of thumb follows from that: a piece of text has to make sense on its own. A sentence that leans on the paragraph before it, with words like 'this' and 'that approach', is hard to lift out. Name the subject and put the answer first.

What GEO is not

GEO is not a way to buy a place in an answer. Nobody can guarantee one, and neither can we. Citations change a lot: in measurements by Ahrefs from 2026, about 60 percent of ChatGPT citations had disappeared the next day.

It is not about special files either. Google writes that you need no AI files or special markup to appear in Search, including in its AI features, and that Google Search does not use llms.txt.