What is GEO? A practical introduction to generative engine optimization

Why we needed another acronym

Search behaviour has shifted quietly over the last two years. Users no longer always type a question into a box and pick from ten results; increasingly they get one answer and glance at the sources beneath it. In that world visibility depends less on ranking and more on being cited.

The difference between GEO and SEO

Classic SEO works to rank a page. GEO works to influence which sources a model trusts while composing its answer. In practice it is a different content and entity discipline built on the same infrastructure.

What they share

Crawlability, speed, clean HTML and structured data are mandatory in both. GEO work cannot start on a site without a technical SEO foundation.

What differs

In SEO a page aims to be clicked; in GEO it aims to be quoted. To be quotable, its first paragraph must stand on its own as a complete answer.

What to do in the first 30 days

1. Measure. List the 50–150 questions that genuinely matter for your brand, run them across the major engines and record who gets cited. This becomes the reference point for every later decision.

2. Fix your entity. Are the basics — company name, founding year, address, founders — consistent across the web? When models see contradictory facts, they do not treat the brand as a reliable entity.

3. Reformat your ten most important pages. Add an opening block that answers the question in 40–60 words. Write it in encyclopedia voice, not marketing voice.

4. Open up access. Publish llms.txt, set a deliberate policy for AI crawlers in robots.txt, and make sure critical content is server-rendered.

How long until it shows?

In our experience entity and content fixes start showing between 8 and 16 weeks, varying with each model's refresh cycle and the brand's existing authority.