Guide
What is GEO? Generative engine optimization.
SEO is about ranking in a list of links. GEO is about being part of the answer when an AI assistant writes one.
The short answer
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work that makes your brand more likely to be found, cited and recommended inside answers written by AI assistants. That includes ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews.
How AI answers are built
When someone asks an AI assistant a question, it answers from two sources: what its model learned in training, and pages it fetches or searches for at that moment. Answer engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT search show the pages they used as sources. To be part of the answer, your pages have to be readable, findable and worth quoting.
The four layers of GEO
- Access. AI crawlers must be allowed to read your site. Check your robots.txt with the AI crawler check.
- Readability. Clear titles, one H1, full descriptions and alt text. Facts in structured data, such as Product schema with price and stock. Run the schema checker.
- Answerability. Pages that answer real buyer questions directly: who it is for, what it is made of, how it compares.
- Mentions. Being named on the sites engines trust in your category: reviews, comparisons, marketplaces, press.
GEO and SEO
They overlap more than they differ. Most GEO work is good SEO done thoroughly: clean pages, structured data, real answers. The difference is the goal. SEO aims for a click from a results page. GEO aims for a mention inside an answer, often with no click at all. See zero-click search.
How to measure it
Ask the questions your buyers ask, in the engines they use, and record who gets named and which sources are cited. Answers change from run to run, so measure repeatedly. The free AI answer check runs one question; Uruora’s AI visibility feature runs several.
Where to start
- Allow the AI crawlers you want.
- Fix thin product descriptions and missing alt text on your best sellers.
- Add or complete Product and Organization schema.
- Write one page that answers the question buyers ask most.
Questions
Is GEO the same as AEO?
They are close. AEO (answer engine optimization) is the older term, from featured snippets and voice assistants. GEO is used for AI-written answers. The work is largely the same.
Does llms.txt help GEO?
It may help some AI tools find your key pages. It is still a proposal, and not every engine reads it. Draft one free.
Can I pay to appear in AI answers?
Not in the organic answer itself. Some engines show ads beside answers, which is a separate channel.