GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
The practice of optimizing your web presence so AI assistants cite your business when relevant. SEO for the AI era.
Also known as: generative engine optimization, AI SEO, AEO, answer engine optimization, AIO
GEO is the discipline emerging around one question: what makes an AI assistant cite your business by name when a relevant query comes in? Some of the answer overlaps with traditional SEO, like clean URLs, fast page loads, and structured data. Some of it does not, like entity disambiguation, citation worthiness, and how often your business is mentioned in places models train on.
The term is new enough that the definition is still being argued over. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and AIO (AI Optimization) get used by different parts of the industry to mean roughly the same thing. We use GEO because it is the most established. For our take on what actually moves AI citation rates, see our blog post on the structured data deficit.
Related terms
AI visibility
How AI assistants describe, recommend, or cite your business when a user asks a relevant question. The thing GeoReputation measures.
structured data
Information on a web page marked up using a shared vocabulary, usually schema.org, so machines (search engines, AI assistants, social cards) can understand what the page is about.
JSON-LD
A lightweight JSON format for marking up structured data on web pages. The format Google recommends and the one AI assistants parse most reliably.