GEO & AEO

GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the work of getting your brand named, recommended and cited in answers written by AI, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews. It starts by reading the answers buyers actually get, finding the material those answers rely on, and improving that material. For Google, it is still part of SEO.

The term comes from the paper "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari and colleagues at Princeton University and IIT Delhi, first published on arXiv on 16 November 2023 and presented at ACM SIGKDD 2024 (arXiv 2311.09735, read 2026-10-20). The paper describes generative engines as systems that gather sources and summarize them into one answer, and treats GEO as the work of improving a source's visibility inside those answers.

In marketing, GEO now usually means the same thing in practice: making sure the AI tools your buyers use mention your brand, describe it accurately, and point to pages you can stand behind.