GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing content so it is surfaced and cited by generative AI engines like Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and the web-search modes of ChatGPT and Claude.
GEO overlaps heavily with AEO but emphasizes the generative output: making sure your content is one of the sources the AI engine pulls from when generating a multi-paragraph answer, and that the answer cites or links back to you.
GEO winners tend to combine strong entity coverage (the page is clearly about named brands, products, and concepts), heavy schema.org markup (which gives the LLM clean structured input), authoritative outbound and inbound citations, and technical health (fast load, server-rendered content, schema visible to GPTBot / ClaudeBot / PerplexityBot / Google-Extended crawlers).
The gap between SEO and GEO is widening because AI engines reward different things than classical Google rank — concise facts, quotable paragraphs, and structured data matter more; deep long-tail SEO content with keyword variations matters less. Both can coexist on the same page.