Is GEO the same as local or geographic SEO?

No. In search marketing, GEO now usually means generative engine optimization, the term from the 2023 GEO paper. It has nothing to do with geotargeting or local map rankings, though the abbreviation causes that confusion.

Who coined generative engine optimization?

The term comes from a 2023 paper by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande, published on arXiv as 2311.09735 and accepted to KDD 2024.

Does GEO replace SEO?

No. Most generative engines search the web before they answer, so a page still has to be crawlable, indexed and relevant. Google says no special optimization is needed for AI Overviews beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet. GEO adds a layer on top: how the page reads once it has been retrieved.

What did the GEO paper find works best?

Adding quotations, adding statistics and citing sources gave the largest gains, around 40 percent on the paper's main visibility metric. Keyword stuffing gave little or no benefit and sometimes made things worse.

AI search glossary

What is GEO? Generative engine optimization explained

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making content more likely to be used, quoted and cited when a generative engine, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews, writes an answer from several web sources.

Also called: GEO, GEO SEO, generative search optimization

Why it matters for AI search

In a generative answer there is no list of ten links to climb. The engine reads several sources and decides which ones to quote and credit, so visibility means being one of the sources it leans on. GEO measures that share of the answer directly, which is closer to what buyers actually see than a keyword ranking.

Where the term comes from

"Generative engine optimization" was introduced in a 2023 paper by researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi (arXiv 2311.09735, later accepted to KDD 2024). The authors define a generative engine as a system that retrieves sources and uses a large language model to write one answer from them. Their point: content creators had almost no control over whether, or how, their pages showed up in those answers. GEO was proposed as a framework for measuring and improving that visibility.

The paper built GEO-bench, a set of 10,000 queries across many domains, and two visibility metrics:

Position-adjusted word count: how many words of the answer come from your source, weighted toward sources cited earlier.
Subjective impression: a model-judged score covering relevance, influence, uniqueness and how likely a reader is to click the citation.

What the experiments showed

The researchers rewrote source pages with nine methods and measured the change. Quotation addition, statistics addition and citing sources were the strongest, improving position-adjusted word count by roughly 40 percent. Keyword stuffing, a classic SEO habit, did not help. In a live test on Perplexity, quotations and statistics again helped while keyword stuffing performed worse than doing nothing.

Two findings matter most for smaller sites:

Results vary by domain. What works for a history question differs from what works for a legal or product question.
Lower-ranked pages gain the most. Citing sources raised visibility by about 115 percent for pages ranked fifth in the underlying search, while the top-ranked page lost ground. GEO is one of the few places where a small site can outperform a bigger one.

What GEO means in practice

Get retrieved first. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode only cite pages that are indexed and eligible for a snippet. The same logic applies to ChatGPT, which needs OAI-SearchBot access.
Write passages an engine can lift: a specific claim, a number with its source, a short quotation from someone credible.
Answer the sub-questions the engine searches for, not only the head term (see query fan-out).
Measure the result in the answers themselves: how often you are named and cited across many prompts, on each engine such as Perplexity.

GEO and the neighbouring terms

GEO is the research-backed name for the practice. Answer engine optimization grew out of featured snippets and voice assistants and focuses on the shape of a direct answer. AI SEO is the broad marketing umbrella, and LLM SEO looks at how the model itself learns and describes your brand. The outcome GEO is chasing is AI citations.

Questions

Is GEO the same as local or geographic SEO?: No. In search marketing, GEO now usually means generative engine optimization, the term from the 2023 GEO paper. It has nothing to do with geotargeting or local map rankings, though the abbreviation causes that confusion.
Who coined generative engine optimization?: The term comes from a 2023 paper by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande, published on arXiv as 2311.09735 and accepted to KDD 2024.
Does GEO replace SEO?: No. Most generative engines search the web before they answer, so a page still has to be crawlable, indexed and relevant. Google says no special optimization is needed for AI Overviews beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet. GEO adds a layer on top: how the page reads once it has been retrieved.
What did the GEO paper find works best?: Adding quotations, adding statistics and citing sources gave the largest gains, around 40 percent on the paper's main visibility metric. Keyword stuffing gave little or no benefit and sometimes made things worse.