What Is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?

Introduction

A few years ago, getting found online meant ranking on Google. Today, a growing number of buying decisions happen inside a conversation with ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini and your brand either gets mentioned in that conversation or it doesn’t. There’s no scrolling to page two.

Table of Contents

This is what Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, is about. It’s not a rebrand of SEO and it’s not a buzzword. It’s a real, measurable discipline with academic research behind it, and in 2026 it’s one of the few areas where a smaller site can genuinely outmaneuver a much larger competitor because the rules are still being written.

Here’s what the research actually says works, what doesn’t, and how to check where your own site stands.

What GEO actually means

GEO is the practice of structuring your content and your brand’s presence across the web so that generative AI models cite you, mention you, or recommend you when someone asks a related question without that person necessarily clicking through to your site at all.

The term was coined by researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, IIT Delhi, and the Allen Institute for AI, and the work was formally presented at the ACM SIGKDD 2024 conference in Barcelona, where it was introduced as the first novel paradigm to help content creators improve their visibility in generative engine responses through a black-box optimization framework. The researchers built a benchmark of roughly 10,000 real user queries pulled from nine different domains, ranging from medical questions to product comparisons, specifically so the findings wouldn’t just reflect one narrow niche.

That’s a meaningfully different starting point than most SEO advice you’ll read, which tends to be opinion dressed up as best practice. GEO, at least in its foundation, has a peer-reviewed study behind it.

How GEO is different from SEO and AEO

If you’ve read our AEO guide or our AEO vs GEO vs SEO breakdown, you already have the high-level framework. The short version worth repeating here: SEO earns you a ranked link, AEO earns you a direct cited answer to a specific question, and GEO earns you a mention inside a broader AI conversation sometimes without any search query matching your content at all.

What’s worth going deeper on in this guide is why that third one behaves so differently, and what the research says actually drives it.

Want the full side-by-side breakdown of goals, platforms, and techniques for all three? See the comparison table on our AI Search Optimization guide.

What the research says actually moves the needle

This is the part most GEO content skips. Here’s what’s been measured, not guessed.

Statistics, sources, and quotes outperform everything else

The Princeton/Georgia Tech team tested nine distinct content techniques against their query benchmark. The strategies included adding authoritative citations within content, including relevant expert quotations, and incorporating quantitative data. Of the nine, three stood out clearly.

Adding statistics to a page improved AI citation visibility by 41%. Citing outside sources improved visibility by 115% for pages that weren’t already ranking near the top of traditional search. Quotation addition came in third, improving visibility by roughly 28%.

The practical takeaway: if your content makes claims without backing them with a number, a study, or a named source, it is structurally weaker for GEO than content that does even if the writing quality is identical.

Promotional language actively hurts you

This one surprises most marketing teams. Semrush research found that promotional, sales-oriented tone shows a 26.19% negative correlation with AI citation rates. Generative engines appear to favour content that reads like a neutral explainer over content that reads like an advertisement, even when both are technically accurate.

This has a direct implication for how you write product pages, comparison content, and anything meant to be GEO-friendly: describe what something does and how it compares, rather than telling the reader why they should buy it. Save the persuasive copy for the call-to-action, not the body content.

Brand mentions matter more than backlinks, by a wide margin

This is probably the single most useful and most counterintuitive finding for anyone coming from a traditional SEO background. An Ahrefs analysis of 76 million AI Overviews found that brand mentions correlate with AI citation probability at 0.664, compared to just 0.218 for backlinks.

In plain terms: a site being talked about by name across the web in forum threads, comparison articles, directory listings, review sites — is a stronger predictor of AI citation than that same site having a large number of backlinks pointing at it. This doesn’t mean backlinks stopped mattering for traditional SEO. It means that for GEO specifically, being mentioned, even without a link attached, carries real weight.

Most citations come from sources brands already control

A Yext study of 6.8 million citations found that 86% originate from brand-managed sources first-party websites account for 44% and business listings account for 42%. This is genuinely good news if you’re a smaller site: you don’t need to win over independent journalists or wait for organic press coverage. The majority of what determines your GEO visibility is within your direct control your own website’s structure, clarity, and the directory and listing presence you build yourself.

GEO still rests on a foundation of good SEO

It would be a mistake to read all of this as “ignore SEO, focus on GEO instead.” Research shows that 87% of ChatGPT citations match a source already in Bing’s top 10 results, and 93.67% of Google AI Overview citations link to a page that’s already ranking in the top 10 organically. As one industry voice put it plainly in recent coverage, the overwhelming majority of GEO success is simply a byproduct of solid, fundamental SEO already being in place.

In other words: GEO doesn’t replace the technical and content work of SEO. It builds an additional layer on top of it. A site with weak technical SEO and thin content has very little chance of being cited by a generative engine, regardless of how many GEO-specific tactics it tries to layer on.

The five things that actually drive GEO performance

Pulling the research together into something actionable:

1. Factual density. Specific numbers, named studies, and direct quotes from credible people or sources. Vague claims (“many experts believe…”) are easy to skip; “a 2024 study found X improved Y by 41%” is not.

2. A non-promotional tone. Write to inform, not to sell. Let the facts make the case for your product rather than adjectives doing the work.

3. Cross-web entity presence. Being mentioned by name, even without a hyperlink across directories, comparison articles, forum discussions, and review platforms. This is a slower-building signal than a single backlink campaign, but the research suggests it’s the more durable one.

4. Strong underlying SEO. Crawlable pages, clean technical health, and content that already performs reasonably in traditional search. GEO amplifies sites with a real foundation; it doesn’t create visibility out of nothing.

5. Structural retrievability. Content broken into clear, independent passages that can be lifted and understood on their own, rather than long unstructured blocks of prose that depend on surrounding context to make sense.

How to check your GEO readiness

You don’t need to guess at any of this. Run your site through SEO Inspector Hub’s free GEO checker to see where you currently stand on entity clarity, structural retrievability, and cross-web presence signals.

The check takes under a minute and gives you a prioritised list of what to fix first, rather than a vague score with no path forward.

What this means if you’re just getting started

Don’t try to do everything in the list above at once. Based on what the research shows has the clearest, most measurable effect, here’s a sensible order:

Start by adding genuine statistics, named sources, and direct quotes to your most important existing page. This is the highest-leverage, lowest-effort change available, and it’s backed by the strongest data point in the entire body of research. Then go through your top content and strip out promotional language, replacing sales-oriented phrasing with plain, factual description. After that, work on getting your brand mentioned not necessarily linked, just mentioned across relevant directories, comparison roundups, and community discussions in your space. Underneath all of it, keep investing in the fundamentals: technical SEO health, clear site structure, and content that genuinely answers the questions people are asking.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?

Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring content and building brand presence so that AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude cite or mention a brand when generating an answer. It was formalised as an academic discipline by researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, IIT Delhi, and the Allen Institute for AI, whose findings were presented at the ACM SIGKDD 2024 conference.

Is there research that proves GEO actually works?

Yes. The foundational study, often called the Princeton GEO study, tested nine optimization techniques across roughly 10,000 real user queries and found that adding statistics, citing sources, and including expert quotations were the three strongest levers, improving AI visibility by up to 41% in controlled testing. Subsequent industry research from Ahrefs, Yext, and Semrush has expanded on these findings with real-world citation data.

Do backlinks still matter for GEO?

Backlinks still matter, but research suggests brand mentions matter more for generative engine citation specifically. An Ahrefs study of 76 million AI Overviews found brand mentions correlate with AI citation probability at 0.664, compared to 0.218 for backlinks. This doesn’t make backlinks irrelevant for GEO, but it does mean a broader strategy focused only on link building is missing a stronger signal.

Does GEO replace SEO?

No, and the research is explicit on this point. The majority of AI citations link to pages that already rank well in traditional search roughly 87% of ChatGPT citations and 93.67% of Google AI Overview citations match a page already in the top 10 organic results. GEO works as an additional layer built on top of solid, existing SEO rather than a replacement for it.

How do I check my GEO score for free?

SEO Inspector Hub offers a free GEO checker that evaluates entity clarity, structural retrievability, and cross-web presence signals for any URL. No signup is required and results are returned in under a minute, alongside a prioritised list of what to address first.

Does writing more promotional or sales-focused content help with GEO?

No, research points the other way. Semrush analysis found that promotional, sales-oriented tone correlates negatively with AI citation rates, by roughly 26%. Content written to inform and explain, with facts doing the persuasive work rather than adjectives, performs better for generative engine visibility.

Conclusion

GEO isn’t a trend dressed up in new vocabulary. It’s a genuinely distinct discipline with a real research foundation, and the data so far points in a clear direction: factual, well-sourced, non-promotional content, built on top of strong existing SEO, with a brand presence that extends across the web rather than living solely on your own site.

The opportunity right now is that most brands haven’t acted on any of this yet. The research has been public since 2024. Very few sites have actually applied it.

Check your GEO readiness free →

Sources referenced in this guide:

Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan & Deshpande, “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization,” KDD 2024, ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
Ahrefs Brand Radar analysis of 76 million AI Overviews
Yext study of 6.8 million AI citations
Semrush research on promotional tone and AI citation correlation