Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of getting your company named, quoted and linked inside AI-written answers. That means ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. When people say "GEO SEO", they mean SEO aimed at the answer instead of the list of links. Same foundations, too: crawlable pages, plain facts, and other websites that agree about you.
I'm Brenden House, and I run Searchmaxxed, an SEO and AI SEO agency for enterprise, B2B SaaS, venture-backed, manufacturing and public-sector companies. This guide is written for their marketing and growth leaders. We tested 900 ChatGPT answers about Australian agencies, checked which searches show an AI Overview, and changed our own site to suit the engines.
In summary
GEO is the part of SEO that earns you a place inside AI answers, as well as a position in the blue links.
- GEO stands for generative engine optimisation. The term comes from a paper by researchers at Princeton and IIT Delhi, and AEO, AI SEO and LLM SEO name the same job.
- Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode need only an indexed page that's eligible for a snippet, so good SEO does most of it.
- In our test of 900 ChatGPT answers, about three in four search results it read never made the answer. Being chosen is the win. That depends on the handful of sites the engine already trusts, from lists to review directories.
- In our Australian checks, AI Overviews showed on most SEO searches but rarely on "SEO agency + city" searches.
- Measure GEO with repeated answer checks, Search Console's generative AI report and real pipeline. Never trust one screenshot.
What does GEO stand for, and where did the term come from?
GEO stands for generative engine optimisation, spelled generative engine optimization in the US. A generative engine is a search tool that writes its own answer from several sources, then links to some of the pages it used.
The name comes from a November 2023 paper by Pranjal Aggarwal and five co-authors, half at Princeton, accepted to the KDD 2024 data-mining conference. Their starting point was blunt. Content creators, they wrote, have "little to no control over when and how their content is displayed" once an AI engine summarises the web.
Three terms help here:
- A large language model (LLM) is the AI system that writes the answer, such as the model behind ChatGPT or Gemini.
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) means the model runs a live search, reads the pages it finds, then writes from them.
- A citation is a link or mention an AI answer shows as one of its sources.
The work goes by other names too. Wikipedia's entry treats GEO as also known as answer engine optimisation (AEO) and artificial intelligence optimisation (AIO). Agencies add AI SEO, LLM SEO and AI search optimisation. At Searchmaxxed we use every one of these names, because buyers search all of them. It's one job. Be the source an AI answer trusts enough to name.
What is GEO in SEO, and is it SEO for AI?
Yes, GEO is SEO for AI answers. It sits inside SEO, since the engines start from search indexes.
Google's guidance on AI features and your website sets one bar for a supporting link. The page must be "indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet". Then: "There are no additional technical requirements". It adds that "all existing SEO fundamentals continue to be worthwhile", starting with letting crawlers in through robots.txt and your CDN.
What changes is the scoreboard. Classic SEO counts rankings and clicks. GEO counts whether the answer names you, quotes you, links to you and describes your company correctly. Those can move apart. A page in fifth spot can become the source an answer quotes while the top result goes unmentioned.
Two kinds of memory matter. Some answers come from what a model learned in training, which you can't edit after the fact. Others come from a live search at the moment of the question, and that part you can shape with pages, facts and mentions.
What's the difference between GEO, SEO and AEO?
SEO wins rankings and clicks. GEO wins a place inside AI-written answers. AEO wins the direct answer to one question, in a featured snippet, a voice reply or an AI answer. One well-built page can serve all three.
I'd run all three as one plan. AEO vs GEO vs AI SEO compares them side by side, including which team usually owns each. Our GEO vs SEO guide covers where the two pull apart, including pages that rank well and still never make the answer. For the question side, read what answer engine optimisation is.
How do AI engines decide which companies to name?
AI engines run a few hidden searches, read the results, then write an answer from the sources they trust most.
Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use "query fan-out", "issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources" to build one response. A question like "which data platform suits a mid-sized insurer" can turn into searches about data platforms, insurers, security reviews and pricing. Your company needs to turn up across that spread, which is why one strong page rarely does it alone.
ChatGPT has to reach your site first. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers". GPTBot, which collects training data, is a separate setting.
We measured what happens after the search. We put 300 Australian agency-buyer questions to ChatGPT three times each, with search on. It pulled 17,870 search results into those 900 answers and kept 4,389 as sources. Being found is the easy part. About three in four results it reads never make the answer.
So where does the model look? Across 900 ChatGPT answers about Australian agencies, a single third-party "best agencies" site was cited in 168 of them. The next three were a second listicle, Semrush's agency directory and Clutch. If you want to be recommended, the job is getting onto the handful of pages the model already trusts.
The engines also disagree with each other. Perplexity cited a review directory (Semrush Agencies, Clutch, DesignRush and the like) in 36 of 44 agency answers. ChatGPT did it in 20 and Claude in 15. One agency's Clutch profile had six reviews and was cited 20 times.
So what does this add up to? Your own site comes first. It has to be crawlable, answer the question and state your facts plainly, or the engine skips it. Then you need to appear on the few outside pages each engine leans on: lists, directories, reviews and press. Answers repeat their sources. Our panels covered agency questions, so map the sources for your own category first.
Does GEO matter for your company yet?
Yes, though it depends on the search. AI Overviews sit on most learning searches. Searches for a supplier by type and city can still look like classic Google.
Google launched AI Overviews in Australia on 29 October 2024, and AI Mode reached Australia on 8 October 2025.
Buying searches look different, and our October 2026 log of Australian SEO searches shows how far apart the two can be:
> “27 of 32 Australian SEO searches we checked showed an AI Overview. Add "agency" and a city and it collapses: 2 of 8. Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Gold Coast, Adelaide and Canberra showed none. Local agency searches are still a ten-blue-links fight.”
The AI-topic keywords themselves are crowded, which matters if your content plan leans on them:
> “"GEO is a blue ocean" is wrong. In our 13 October keyword capture, Australian AI-topic keywords had a median difficulty of 55, against 29 for everything else, and 82% already showed an AI Overview.”
What does that mean for you? If your buyers ask "what is", "how do I" or "which is better" questions, AI answers already sit above your page. Supplier searches, such as "contract electronics manufacturer Melbourne", may still turn on classic rankings. Our check covered SEO searches only. Test your own category before you plan, because most B2B companies need both.
What does the research say works for GEO?
The original GEO paper tested nine ways to rewrite a page, and adding citations, quotations and statistics lifted visibility the most. Keyword stuffing did little or harm.
| Change to the page | What the 2023 GEO paper found |
|---|---|
| Cite credible sources | Among the top three methods: a 30 to 40% relative gain on position-adjusted word count |
| Add quotations from relevant sources | Among the top three methods |
| Add statistics in place of vague claims | Among the top three methods |
| Stuff in more keywords from the query | Performed poorly; on Perplexity, about 10% worse than no change |
My favourite finding is about rank. For sites ranked fifth, citing sources lifted visibility 115.1%, while the top-ranked site lost 30.3% on average. Lower pages gained most. The authors also ran the methods on Perplexity live and found gains of up to 37%.
Keep the limits in view. The tests ran on a 2023 benchmark of 10,000 queries, and every engine has changed since. Treat it as direction, not a recipe. It lines up with how I think about content generally: "It just matters if it's good and if you're giving it information gain."
How do you do GEO?
You do GEO in seven steps. Open the crawlers, answer first, add real numbers, make your facts agree, earn outside mentions, check the answers, and measure pipeline.
- Let the search crawlers in. Check robots.txt, your CDN and any firewall rules for Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot.
- Answer at the top of the page. Put the direct answer in the first lines, in text, under headings phrased the way buyers ask.
- Add numbers, sources and quotes. Swap "fast implementation" for the real figure. Link the source behind each claim about your market.
- Make your facts agree everywhere. Your company is an entity to the engines, a thing with a name, products and markets. Keep its name, product list and markets identical on your site, schema, LinkedIn page and review profiles.
- Earn mentions on the sites answers draw from. Think reviews, industry directories, "best of" lists, press and genuine community threads. SEOs call this authority: other sites vouching for you.
- Check the answers on a schedule. Ask the same questions in each engine every month. Log the companies each answer names and the sites it cites.
- Measure against pipeline. Visibility you can't tie to demo requests, enquiries or deals won't tell you whether the work is paying.
What we changed on our own site
We run these steps on searchmaxxed.com before we sell them, and the changes are public, so anyone can check them today, 27 October 2026:
| What we did | Why it helps GEO |
|---|---|
| Our robots.txt names OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User and lets them in | Blocking OAI-SearchBot keeps a site out of ChatGPT search answers |
| We publish an llms.txt file that lists our core pages, each with a plain markdown version | A model can read the page text without the design, scripts or menus |
| We keep an AI instructions page with our services, audience, proof and contact pages in plain facts | Every engine reads the same description of who we are |
| Each article opens with the answer and uses question headings | An engine can lift one section whole and still make sense |
Will llms.txt alone get you cited? I wouldn't bet on it. Neither Google's AI features guide nor OpenAI's crawler page lists it as a way to get chosen as a source. It costs an hour, though. The crawler settings matter more, because a blocked bot can't cite you at all.
A worked example: an industrial pump manufacturer
Take a made-up manufacturer. It builds slurry pumps for mining and sells them in Australia and Chile. Its head of marketing wants ChatGPT to suggest it for "best slurry pump manufacturer for mining". Here's the list applied to one page.
| Step | What you'd change |
|---|---|
| Crawlers | Confirm robots.txt, the CDN and the firewall allow Googlebot and OAI-SearchBot |
| Answer first | Open the mining page with what the pumps handle, where they run and how to request a quote |
| Numbers | Add flow rates, wear-part life and how many mine sites run the pumps |
| Facts that agree | Match the company name, product names and markets on the site, schema, LinkedIn and distributor pages |
| Mentions | Earn mining trade press coverage and a place on the supplier comparisons the engines cite |
| Checks | Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the same five buyer questions each month |
| Pipeline | Count quote requests from mining buyers, not AI traffic |
None of that is exotic. It's SEO done properly, plus a habit of checking what the AI answers say. For ChatGPT on its own, our guide on how to rank in ChatGPT goes further.
How do you measure GEO?
Measure GEO three ways: Search Console's generative AI report for Google, repeated answer checks for the chatbots, and enquiry data for the result. Treat any "AI traffic" figure in analytics with suspicion until someone checks it for bots.
Google's generative AI performance report now covers every site: "As of August 31, 2026, we've rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide". You can group the data by page, country, device and date, so each market's AI impressions show on their own.
For ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity there's no console, so you build one. List 20 to 50 buyer questions. Run them monthly in each engine, and log the companies named and the sites cited. Answers change between runs, so judge the trend over a quarter. Our roundup of AI visibility tools compares the software that automates this.
Analytics is where people get fooled. We saw it on an enterprise B2B client's account. A client's GA4 showed AI-assistant visits jump from 354 to 6,050 in a month. Almost none of it was real. About 5,700 came in three one-hour bursts: same 1920x1080 desktop Chrome, all new users, no referrer, about 20 seconds each, landing on two pages. Real AI traffic was 385 sessions against 354 the month before, roughly flat.
A report built on that chart would have claimed a seventeenfold win. Check the traffic, then check whether the enquiries moved.
Is GEO replacing SEO?
No. GEO depends on SEO. Google's AI features only link to pages that are indexed and snippet-eligible, and ChatGPT needs its search crawler to reach your site.
What changed is where buyers meet you. Some questions now end inside an AI Overview or a ChatGPT reply, and for those a mention is the win. The click may come later, or never, which SEOs call a zero-click search. Buying searches still reward rankings.
I learned what a ranking is worth on roofs, long before anyone said GEO. Before Searchmaxxed, I built Radiant Roof Repairs from zero to more than A$1 million a year in revenue using SEO as the only marketing channel. Three high-intent Gold Coast roofing searches reached number one within 90 days. I did the pages, research, competitor checks and updates manually.
When we reached the map pack it was phone call after phone call: 1,487 calls came off our Google Business Profile. Most of that came through Google Maps. Finding people to do the work became the hard part.
That's an SEO result from my own business, and it's no forecast for yours. The market was small; the method wasn't. It carries over to AI answers. Being the company buyers are told to shortlist is worth a lot when the deals are big.
Where does Searchmaxxed fit?
Searchmaxxed is an SEO, AI SEO, GEO and AEO agency for enterprise, B2B SaaS, venture-backed, manufacturing and public-sector companies. We do technical SEO, content, link building, digital PR and LLM SEO. The aim: rank in Google and get named by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers. Our GEO service has the full detail.
GEO comes inside every managed package. The packages differ in how many pages we ship each month and how much off-site work sits behind them. A page release means an approved new page or a substantial rebuild of one.
| Package | Who it suits | What it includes for GEO |
|---|---|---|
| Growth System | A company growing in one or two markets | 30 page releases a month, work on up to 4 existing landing pages, one qualified link action a month, AI visibility tracking |
| Agentic Search Engineering | A competitive or national category | Everything in Growth System, plus 50 page releases a month, comparison, industry and integration pages, digital PR and link campaigns, AI answer tracking across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews |
| Custom & Enterprise | Several brands, several markets or a very large site | Dedicated engineering, custom reporting and original first-party research |
Here's how we do it. We build on a website you own, our Agentic Website. AI agents pull your Search Console and GA4 data, read the Google results, scrape competitor pages and check what AI answers say about you. That data feeds the Managed Search Loop. It shows which page, fix or link should bring in the most pipeline next. Off your site, the Off-Page Source Layer builds the links, digital PR and mentions the engines draw on. Then we check the live page and measure what changed.
Want a diagnosis first? The AI SEO Audit takes five business days. It shows where buyers search without finding you, every fix ranked by what it's worth, and the plan.
Searchmaxxed's work has generated more than A$10 million in revenue through search for its clients.
Is Searchmaxxed right for you?
We suit marketing and growth leaders who want GEO and SEO built and shipped by one team, with output they can count. If you only want to watch your AI mentions, a tool costs less.
| Searchmaxxed is a good fit if | Look elsewhere if |
|---|---|
| You want pages built and shipped every month, in Google and AI answers together | You only want a dashboard of AI mentions |
| You want to own your site, repository, content and data from day one | You want search to fill this month's pipeline on its own |
| You compete in a crowded or national category and need links and digital PR | You need one fix or one page, then nothing ongoing |
| You want direct access to the people doing the work, with no account managers | You want strategy advice with no changes to your site |
If you're in the right-hand column, a visibility tool or a smaller project will serve you better, and that's fine.
Frequently asked questions
What is GEO used for?
GEO gets a company named, quoted or linked in AI answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. It matters most on questions people ask before they buy, such as "who's the best" or "which is better".
Does GEO mean geographic or local SEO?
Usually not. In SEO talk today, GEO nearly always means generative engine optimisation. Some older articles and ad platforms use "geo" for location targeting, so check which one a provider means before you buy.
Is GEO different from AEO?
Barely. AEO aims to supply the direct answer to one question, while GEO aims to put your name in the wider AI answer. Wikipedia treats them as the same practice, and one page can win both.
How long does GEO take to work?
Access fixes can show fast. OpenAI says ChatGPT search adjusts about 24 hours after a robots.txt change. Content and outside mentions take longer, so judge a full quarter of answers and enquiries before you decide.
Should I block AI crawlers to protect my content?
Block the training bots if you like, but keep the search bots open if you want to appear in AI answers. OpenAI lets you allow OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search while you block GPTBot for training.
Can I do GEO myself?
Yes. Open your crawlers, rewrite your key pages to answer first with real numbers, and make your company facts agree across the web. Then re-ask the engines monthly. The hard part is keeping it going and earning the outside mentions.
How do I check whether ChatGPT recommends my company?
Ask it the questions your buyers ask, with search on, several times over a few days. Log the companies and sites it names. One answer proves little, because the next run can differ.
What should you do next?
Ask ChatGPT and Google the three questions your best buyers would ask while shortlisting. Write down which companies come up. Not you? That's your GEO gap. If you'd like us to close it, let's talk pricing.