generative engine optimization
In plain wordsShaping web content so that AI chatbots and AI search features are more likely to find it, quote it and recommend it — the AI-era version of search engine optimization.
Work aimed at getting content picked up, cited and presented favorably when generative AIgenerative AI, n.: AI that produces something new on request, such as an essay, a picture, a song or a piece of code, having absorbed from enormous numbers of existing examples what such things typically look like. systems (AI-written search summaries, chat assistants that search the web, so-called answer engines) compose their replies, as opposed to simply earning a high-ranked link on a results page. Techniques include stating facts and statistics explicitly, adding citations and quotations from authorities, writing clear self-contained passages that retrieval systemsretrieval-augmented generation, n.: Giving an AI an open-book exam: before answering, it looks up relevant passages in a set of documents and bases its reply on them, often citing where each point came from. can lift, keeping pages crawlable, and earning mentions in sources that models trust. The introducing paper reported visibility gains of up to 40% on its GEO-bench benchmark. As AI answers reduce clicks through to websites, marketers treat GEO as a successor or complement to search engine optimization, while search companies maintain that sound SEO practice still applies.
Our GEO audit found the chatbots cited a competitor's FAQ because it stated prices in plain sentences.
Origin
Introduced by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande in 'GEO: Generative Engine Optimization', posted to arXiv on 16 November 2023. The term entered marketing vocabulary in 2024–2025 as AI search summaries spread; New York magazine declared in August 2025 that SEO was dead and GEO had arrived.
Usage note
Manipulative versions shade into spam and LLM groomingLLM grooming, n.: Flooding the internet with propaganda written mainly for machines rather than people, hoping AI chatbots will soak it up and repeat it to their users.; where optimization ends and manipulation begins is contested. The many rival labels (AEO, LLMO, AI SEO) are largely interchangeable.
Related
- retrieval-augmented generationretrieval-augmented generation, n.: Giving an AI an open-book exam: before answering, it looks up relevant passages in a set of documents and bases its reply on them, often citing where each point came from.
- LLM groomingLLM grooming, n.: Flooding the internet with propaganda written mainly for machines rather than people, hoping AI chatbots will soak it up and repeat it to their users.
- llms.txtllms.txt, n.: A short guide file that a website puts at a standard address to help AI assistants find and understand its most useful pages.
- semantic searchsemantic search, n.: Search that understands what you mean, not just the words you typed, so a search for 'cheap places to stay' also finds 'budget hotels'.
- information retrievalinformation retrieval, n.: The study and engineering of search: how to organize huge piles of documents so that the few that matter to someone's question can be found and ranked quickly. AI systems rely on it to look things up.
- citationcitation, n.: A pointer from something an AI says to the source that supports it — a link, document or quoted passage — so people can check the claim for themselves.
Sources
- Aggarwal, P., Murahari, V., Rajpurohit, T., Kalyan, A., Narasimhan, K. & Deshpande, A. (2023). GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. arXiv:2311.09735. arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735
- Herrman, J. (2025). SEO Is Dead. Say Hello to GEO. New York Magazine (Intelligencer), 4 August 2025. nymag.com/intelligencer/article/seo-is-dead-say-hello-to-geo.html
Mentioned in
LLM groomingLLM grooming, n.: Flooding the internet with propaganda written mainly for machines rather than people, hoping AI chatbots will soak it up and repeat it to their users., llms.txtllms.txt, n.: A short guide file that a website puts at a standard address to help AI assistants find and understand its most useful pages.