The short answer
When a buyer asks an AI assistant "which payroll software should a 50-person company use?", the assistant names a handful of options. GEO is the work of being one of them, being described accurately, and being cited as a source. It is also called answer engine optimisation (AEO) or AI search optimisation.
How GEO differs from SEO
| Question | SEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|
| Where you appear | A ranked list of links | Inside a written answer |
| What you measure | Position and clicks | How often you are named, in what words, and which sources are cited |
| How stable it is | Rankings move slowly | Answers change every time the question is asked |
| What earns it | Relevant pages and links | Clear, factual, well-sourced content and mentions on sites the engines trust |
The two are linked. An Ahrefs study of 1.9 million Google AI Overview citations found that 76.1% of cited pages also ranked in Google's top ten (reported by Crowdo, 2026). Good SEO is the foundation; GEO builds on it.
What the research says works
- Put the answer first. Assistants lift short, self-contained passages. State the answer in the opening sentence, then explain.
- Use facts, numbers and sources. The Princeton and IIT Delhi study that named the field found that adding statistics, quotations and citations raised visibility in AI answers by up to 40% (Aggarwal et al., 2024).
- Keep content current. Pages cited by AI assistants are, on average, more recently published than pages in ordinary search results, according to an Ahrefs analysis of about 17 million cited URLs (reported by Crowdo, 2026).
- Be mentioned elsewhere. Engines lean on review sites, trade press and directories. If competitors are on those pages and you are not, they are named and you are not.
- Let AI crawlers in. A page that blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot cannot be read by them.
- Do not stuff keywords. The same research found it does not help.
Why you have to measure it differently
An AI answer is a sample, not a result. Ask the same question twice and the list of brands often changes. Independent testing found that fewer than 1 in 100 repeated runs return the same list (ThriveStack, July 2026). A single screenshot of ChatGPT therefore tells you very little.
The honest way to measure GEO is to ask each question many times on each engine and report a rate with its range: "named in 12 of 20 runs, likely range 39% to 78%". That is how GenengineAI reports every number. Read the methodology.
How to start
- Write down the ten questions your buyers actually ask.
- Measure how often each engine names you, and who it names instead.
- Read the sources the engines cite, and find the ones where you are missing.
- Correct wrong facts at the source, publish clear answer-first pages, and earn mentions where competitors are cited.
- Measure again, and keep what worked.
Related: AI reputation monitoring · What GenengineAI measures · Pricing