Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Shaping content so AI assistants quote and cite it, not just so Google ranks it.
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What it is
Classic SEO chases a ranking so someone clicks. GEO chases a citation inside somebody else's answer: the sentence ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or an AI Overview lifts from your page and footnotes back to you. The unit you optimize stops being the page and becomes the extractable passage.
Nobody outside these companies has the ranking rules, and the products differ enormously from each other, so treat the playbook as tactics to test rather than settled fact. The ones worth testing: answer the question early and completely under a heading phrased the way people ask it, keep facts atomic and quotable (one claim per sentence, numbers with dates and a source), spell out entity names instead of leaning on 'it' and 'the product', publish comparison tables and specs as real HTML, and keep your facts consistent everywhere else on the web. Some systems appear to lean on third-party mentions (reviews, forums, roundups), so off-site consistency may be doing work backlinks used to. The popular rules of thumb, like a 40-word answer block, are heuristics people found useful, not published thresholds.
Gotchas: a citation often brings zero traffic, so measure mentions and branded search, not sessions. Answers vary run to run and most products expose no position to track, so the practical measurement is a fixed set of queries run on a schedule with citations and mentions counted each time. And content that only exists inside a JS-rendered widget, a PDF, or an image is a real accessibility risk: some crawlers handle those formats and some do not, you rarely know which one is reading you, so put the facts in crawlable HTML. GEO and AEO overlap but are not one word: answer engine optimization predates generative systems and also covers conventional answer surfaces like featured snippets and voice results.
Ask AI for it
Rewrite this page for generative engine optimization so an AI assistant could lift and cite it accurately. Start by identifying the passages that answer questions this audience actually asks. Make each of those stand on its own: state the claim explicitly, name the product and the subject instead of using pronouns or 'as mentioned above', and make sure the passage still reads correctly with no surrounding context. Put every statistic in its own sentence with a number, a date, and a named source, using only evidence I supplied or that you can verify. Invent nothing. Preserve the page's natural heading structure and voice rather than converting every H2 into a question, and add comparison tables or spec lists only where real comparison data exists. Keep the content in crawlable HTML rather than behind tabs or click-to-load.