GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
The practice of optimizing how AI assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini mention your brand in generated answers — accurately, favorably and prominently. Coined by a Princeton-led study (KDD 2024).
Notes
The study that introduced the term compared nine tactics across 10,000 queries and found that adding statistics, adding quotations, and citing named sources improved visibility metrics by roughly 30–40% relative. Keyword stuffing did not work.
Where SEO competes for rankings on a results page, GEO competes for being cited, mentioned and recommended inside the answer. The two share their technical foundation — crawlability, server rendering, clean heading structure — so GEO is best understood as an extension of SEO, not a replacement.
Sources
Updated: Jun 10, 2026