Generative engine optimisation
In short
Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is changing a web page so that an AI search tool is more likely to cite it inside a written answer. It is aimed at that answer, not at a list of blue links.
- Also called
- GEO, Generative engine optimization
- Topic
- Using AI tools
- Level
- Some background helps
- First described
- 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 and presented at KDD 20241.
Search engine optimisation tries to move a page up a list of links. Generative engine optimisation aims at a different screen: the paragraph an AI search tool writes, where a site may show up only as a citation inside a sentence. Pranjal Aggarwal at IIT Delhi, with Vishvak Murahari, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande at Princeton and two independent co-authors, introduced the name in a paper posted on 16 November 2023 and presented at the KDD conference in 20241.
They define a generative engine as a system that retrieves documents and then uses language models to write an answer grounded on those documents, with citations. The products they named were BingChat, Google's Search Generative Experience and Perplexity1. Because sources are woven into one reply, they argue that a simple rank is a poor score. They measure how many words are tied to a citation, and they give more weight to citations near the start of the answer1.
On a benchmark of 10,000 queries they rewrote one source at a time. Adding statistics, quotations and citations of other sources helped most. Their best edits raised a position-weighted visibility score by 41% against an unedited page, and a subjective score by 28%. The abstract puts the gain at up to 40%. Keyword stuffing, repeating the question's words, did not do well1. On the live Perplexity site, the same style of edit reached up to 37% in their test1.
Those figures are the authors' experiment, not a promise about Google today. The main test took the top five Google results and had GPT-3.5 write the answer1. Google's own guide for site owners is plainer: there are no extra requirements to be linked from AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special file or schema.org markup to add. A page still has to be indexed and allowed to show a snippet2.
You can keep a page out with the same controls as ordinary Search. noindex removes it. nosnippet, data-nosnippet and max-snippet limit what can be quoted, including in these AI features. Google-Extended, a separate robots.txt rule, covers some other Google AI training and grounding, not AI Overviews or AI Mode2.
Example
In the paper's tests, a source was cited more heavily after the authors added numbers, a quotation from somewhere else, or citations, and gained little from stuffing the page with the words in the question1.
Why it matters
If readers stop at the AI paragraph, being named inside it matters in the way a first-page ranking used to. Google says ordinary helpful pages are what it looks for, not a special GEO file2.
Questions people ask
Is GEO the same as SEO?
No. SEO tries to rank a page in a list of links. GEO, as the 2023 paper defines it, tries to get a page quoted inside an AI-written answer1. Google says its usual SEO advice still covers AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that no extra optimisation is required2.
Will adding statistics make ChatGPT cite my page?
Nothing in the research guarantees a particular product will cite you. The 41% gain was on the authors' test, where GPT-3.5 wrote answers from five Google results. A separate test on Perplexity reached up to 37%. That does not fix how any one product behaves now1.
Do I need special markup for Google's AI answers?
Google says no. There is no extra technical requirement, no special schema.org type, and no machine-readable AI file to add. The page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet, the same bar as ordinary Search2.
Can I opt out of being quoted?
Yes. noindex drops the page from Search. nosnippet, data-nosnippet and max-snippet limit the text that can be shown, including in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google-Extended does not control those Search features2.