What is GEO, and how does it differ from SEO?

What does generative engine optimisation mean?

A generative engine is a system that writes an answer instead of returning a list of links: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, or the AI summary above Google's results. Generative engine optimisation is everything you do so that such a system can use your pages as a source and describe your business correctly.

You may also meet the terms AEO (answer engine optimisation) and LLM visibility. They describe the same work.

How does an assistant arrive at its answer?

In two ways, often combined.

• From what the model learned. A language model is trained on a large body of text. What was written about your business before that training may be part of what it knows; what was written later is not.
• From a live search. Many assistants search the web while answering, read a handful of pages and cite them. This is where a well-built page can make a difference soonest.

In both cases the assistant does not rely on your site alone. It also draws on what others say about you: directories, trade press, reviews, partner sites.

What is the difference between GEO and SEO?

• The result. SEO earns a place in a list the visitor chooses from. GEO earns a mention in one answer, with a few sources at most.
• The unit. Search engines rank pages. Assistants lift passages: a definition, a step, a comparison. A passage that needs the rest of the page to make sense is rarely quoted.
• The crawlers. Besides Googlebot and Bingbot there are crawlers such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. Each can be allowed or refused in robots.txt, and some sites refuse them without knowing it.
• The measurement. There is no position to track. You put a fixed set of questions to the assistants and record who is mentioned and which sources are cited.

What stays the same?

Most of it. A site that search engines can crawl, that loads fast, that answers real questions and that other sites refer to is also a good source for an assistant. Assistants that search the web lean on search indexes, so a page that ranks nowhere is unlikely to be retrieved. That is why we treat GEO as an extension of SEO, not a substitute.

Where do you start?

• Ask the assistants the questions your customers would ask, and write down the answers and the sources.
• Check that AI crawlers are not refused, and that your main text is in the HTML the server sends rather than added by JavaScript afterwards.
• Give each important question its own page, with the answer in the first few sentences.
• Add structured data for your organisation, your services and the questions you answer.
• Correct what other sites say about you where it is wrong or out of date.

An llms.txt file can help to map the site, and our guide on being cited by ChatGPT takes the steps one by one. How we carry this out is described under GEO and LLM visibility.