What is GEO and how is it different from SEO?
What GEO (generative engine optimization) is, what it shares with SEO, how it changes what you measure and which content wins, and what the research says.
GEO (generative engine optimization) is the work of getting your site to show up and be cited when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Google's AI summaries a question. SEO aims to put you near the top of a list of links, and GEO aims to make you one of the few sources an answer uses. They share the same base, because if a search engine cannot read your site, an assistant cannot either, but they change what you measure and the kind of page that wins.
Updated: November 2026
The term comes from a study by Princeton and IIT Delhi presented at KDD 2024, which found that some changes to a page's text raised its visibility in generated answers by up to 40% (the paper).
How are they alike and how are they different?
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| What you win | A position in the results list | Being cited or named in the answer |
| Who reads your site | Search engine bots | Those same bots, plus the search bots from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, and the agents that come in when a user asks them for something |
| How you measure it | Rankings, impressions and clicks | Whether you show up among the sources for each question and which agents visit your site |
| Which content wins | Pages that match a search | Direct answers, with data, sources and quotes the assistant can reuse |
| How fast it changes | Rankings move slowly | The same question can get a different answer the next day |
What does the research say?
In that study, the authors tested nine ways of rewriting a page and measured how much of it showed up in the answers. The ones that raised visibility the most were adding quotes, adding statistics and citing sources. Stuffing the text with keywords, an old SEO tactic, did not help, and on Perplexity it lowered visibility by 10% compared to the unchanged page. Results varied by topic, so it pays to measure with your own questions.
Do I have to stop doing SEO?
No, because GEO builds on it. Google says that to appear in its AI Overviews and AI Mode there are no requirements beyond regular SEO: your page has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet (Google's guide). What GEO adds is thinking about the other assistants, which read your site with their own bots, and about how each page is written so an AI can cite it without guessing. We cover Google's side in how do I show up in Google's AI Overviews.
Are GEO, AEO and LLMO the same thing?
In practice, yes. AEO (answer engine optimization) was in use earlier, when the target was featured snippets and voice assistants, and today it is used almost the same way as GEO. LLMO (large language model optimization) is another name for the same thing. What matters is what the tool you use actually measures, and we cover that in which GEO tools fix your site instead of just measuring it.
Where do I start?
- Check whether AI bots can get into your site (which ones they are and how to let them in).
- Run your site through Peaje's free radar, which tells you in under a minute what an agent understands about your site and whether ChatGPT and Claude cite you for up to 3 questions about your business.
- Write the pages that answer what your customers ask, with concrete data and its sources.
- Measure again a few weeks later, because answers change.
If you want someone to run that cycle with you, Peaje's agent tracks 20 questions about your business in ChatGPT and Claude, writes drafts of the pages you are missing and measures again at 2 and 6 weeks. It costs US$30 a month (the founder price for the first 50 businesses, then US$69), according to the pricing page.