AI & Web Glossary
Generative engine optimization (GEO)
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your business easy for AI systems to find, understand, and cite, so you get named in AI-generated answers the way SEO gets you ranked in search results.
When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity to recommend a provider, the AI assembles an answer from sources it found and trusted. GEO is the discipline of becoming one of those sources: publishing content that directly answers real questions, marking up your site with structured data so machines parse your facts correctly, and keeping your business information consistent everywhere it appears.
GEO doesn't replace SEO; the two share foundations and most of the work serves both. The practical difference is the unit of competition. SEO competes for a position on a results page that a human scans. GEO competes for a mention inside one synthesized answer, which makes clear, quotable, well-structured content disproportionately valuable.
It's definitional here, but we've written a full how-to if you want the tactics: see our guide to getting cited by AI search, or the GEO portion of our SEO service. The short version: the businesses showing up in AI answers right now are mostly the ones who started before their competitors thought it mattered.
Where this shows up in practice
- Our SEO & GEO service puts this to work for small and mid-sized businesses.
- From the blog: How to get your business cited by AI search