Generative engine optimisation (GEO)

What generative engine optimisation is

Generative engine optimisation is the work of being one of the businesses an AI answer names. A generative engine is a search tool that writes an answer instead of showing a list of links. ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode all work this way. They search the web, read a few pages and write one reply. That reply often names a handful of businesses and links the pages it used.

The name comes from a 2023 research paper by researchers at Princeton University and IIT Delhi, later published at KDD 2024 (arXiv). They showed that the way a page is written changes how much of it ends up in an AI answer.

You will also see the same work called answer engine optimisation (AEO) or AI SEO. The names stress different things, but the methods overlap. Our guide AEO vs GEO vs AI SEO sets out the differences. Our AI SEO services page describes how we do the work for Australian businesses.

Generative engines answer in four steps

Every generative engine searches, retrieves, writes and cites, and GEO works on each step. Most of the rules for getting in are public, and they are mostly the rules of ordinary search.

• Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. It says there are no additional requirements, and that both features may use query fan-out to find supporting pages. (Google Search Central)
• OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. GPTBot, its training crawler, is a separate setting. (OpenAI)
• Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot for a site to appear in its results. (Perplexity)

Our guide How generative engine optimisation works goes through each step and what to change at each one.

What the research found

The GEO paper found that adding quotes, statistics and citations made a page more visible in AI answers, and that keyword stuffing made it less visible. The researchers built a benchmark of questions across many subjects, called GEO-bench. They rewrote source pages nine different ways and measured how much of each generated answer drew on each page.

The best methods raised that share by roughly 30 to 40%. Lower-ranked pages gained the most: adding citations raised the visibility of the fifth-ranked page by 115%. Keyword stuffing, the habit of repeating a search phrase, did worse than leaving the page alone.

The study has limits. It was a lab benchmark, it used engines from 2023, and it changed one page at a time. Read it as evidence for clear, checkable writing, not as a recipe. Our guide Does generative engine optimisation work? covers the findings and their limits in detail.

GEO, AEO, AI SEO and SEO

GEO, AEO and AI SEO name overlapping work that sits on top of ordinary SEO. The table shows what each term stresses.

Our answer engine optimisation page covers AEO the same way this page covers GEO.

What we found on Australian business websites

Most local business websites we checked are open to AI crawlers, but few say in code what kind of business they are or where they work. We check these sites ourselves and publish the results; the method is on our local data page.

For GEO, that pattern matters. An engine that can reach a page but cannot tell what the business is, or where it works, has less reason to name it. Structured data and plain opening sentences fix that, and they are where we usually start.

Results

Gridly is an Australian guide to EVs and home energy. Liam built its SEO and content system with the Gridly team. By October 2026 Ahrefs recorded Gridly in 1.7K AI responses across platforms and 508 Google AI Overview citations. The Gridly case study gives the source and time frame for each figure. Grove Pest Control, a Sydney business, went from 1 to 15 leads a week over four months, with SEO the only change.

What our GEO work includes

Our GEO work is the same service as our AI SEO services, described from the GEO side. It covers four things:

• making sure Google and the AI search crawlers can reach every page you want found;
• adding structured data and matching business details, so engines can tell who you are and where you work;
• writing pages that answer a real customer question in the first two sentences, with facts an engine can check;
• asking the main engines your customers' questions each month and recording who they name and which pages they cite.

Every engagement starts with a check of your site and is scoped and priced upfront. Our guide to what AI SEO costs explains what drives the price.

What GEO can't promise

Nobody can promise that an AI engine will name your business. Each engine decides its own answers, and the same question can get a different answer the next time it is asked. Google says meeting its requirements does not guarantee a page will be shown.

What GEO can do is remove the reasons you would be left out and give engines clear, checkable pages to quote. Then you measure over time; our guide on checking whether AI tools mention your business shows how.

GEO by location

GEO is part of our AI SEO work in every area we cover. Each page below shows what we found when we checked that area's local business websites, and what we would fix first.