Generative Engine Optimization

When someone asks an AI assistant a question, the answer is assembled from sources and often shown without a click. Traditional SEO competes for position in a list of links. GEO competes to be one of the sources the answer is built from.

The shift matters because the click may never happen. A page can influence thousands of answers and see almost none of that traffic, which breaks the measurement every SEO team is built around.

What appears to help

The honest framing first: this is a young field, the systems are opaque, and much of what is sold as GEO expertise is guesswork with a price tag. The following are reasonable inferences, not established rules.

Answer the question early and plainly. Systems extracting a claim tend to take a clear sentence over a paragraph that circles the point.

Make claims attributable. Specific, checkable statements with a source are easier to quote than general assertions, and quoting is the mechanism.

Structure the page. Clear headings, question-shaped subheads, and a definition near the top give a retrieval system obvious units to pull.

Be current. Systems favour recent sources for anything time-sensitive, and there is more of that than people assume.

What has not changed

The underlying requirement is the same as it has been: say something that is true, specific and not available in the same form on a hundred other pages. A model summarising ten interchangeable pages will cite whichever it happened to retrieve. A page with a number, a method or a first-hand observation gives it a reason.

Treat GEO as an extension of doing the work properly, not a separate discipline — and be sceptical of anyone selling a technique for it, since nobody outside the model providers can currently verify one.