NodpickWhat is GEO?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a brand easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude to find, understand and recommend. The goal is to be named, and cited, inside generated answers rather than only ranked in a list of links.
How GEO works
AI assistants that search the web retrieve a handful of pages and write an answer from them. GEO work therefore covers three things: being present on the pages the assistants retrieve, stating facts about your brand clearly and consistently, and structuring your own pages so that they are easy to quote.
GEO and SEO
GEO builds on SEO rather than replacing it. Crawlable pages, relevance and authority still decide which sources are retrieved. What changes is the unit of success: a mention and position in an answer, instead of a click from a results page.
GEO and AEO
AEO (answer engine optimization) is the older, overlapping term, from the featured-snippet and voice-search era. GEO is more often used for generative assistants. Both aim for the same outcome: being named in the answer.
Read more: What is GEO? Generative engine optimization explained