GEO & AI Search
What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?
GEO is the practice of making a business legible, verifiable and consistently described across the web so AI answer engines can find, trust and cite it. The term comes from a 2024 academic paper. Unlike SEO, which competes for a ranked link, GEO competes to be a source inside a generated answer.
The term originates in Aggarwal et al., presented at KDD 2024 (arXiv:2311.09735), which introduced a benchmark for measuring how content changes affect visibility in generative responses. The vocabulary is still unsettled: you will also see AEO, LLMO, GAIO and AI Search Optimization used for broadly the same discipline. We use GEO because it is the term from the original research.
There is no secret tag or file behind it. Google's own documentation states there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode and no special structured data to add. GEO is therefore not a technical trick. It is the work of being clearly identifiable as an entity, consistently described across sources you do not control, and structured so retrieval systems can parse and quote you.
Informational · Updated 2026-08-10
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