Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Mode a question and you get a written answer, backed by a handful of cited sources, rather than a list of ten links. For a business, the stakes shift. Ranking well is no longer enough: you need to be cited in the answer. That is what GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, is about.
What is GEO?
GEO covers the practices that make it more likely a piece of content will be picked up and cited by a generative engine. The term comes from a research paper published in late 2023 and presented at KDD 2024. Its authors built a benchmark of varied queries, GEO-bench, and measured how different rewrites of the same content affected its visibility in generated answers. Their conclusion: well chosen, these optimisations can raise that visibility by up to 40%.
GEO and SEO: rivals or allies?
Allies. Generative engines rely on pages they can find and crawl; Google's AI Overviews draw on the same index as classic search. A page that is invisible in SEO therefore has little chance of being cited. GEO adds a layer: how the content is written and structured so an engine can extract an answer from it and credit the source.
SEO gets you a place in the list. GEO gets you a sentence in the answer.
What GEO brings to your site
Being there when the decision is made
Someone reading a generated answer often stops there. If your name is among the sources, it enters their thinking at the very moment they compare, choose or look for a provider. If it is not, you do not exist for that search, even with a good position further down the page.
A chance for those who are not first
This is the study's most encouraging finding: the gains mostly benefit lower-ranked sources. For the source ranked fifth, citing its references more than doubled its visibility in answers, while the first-ranked source lost ground. For a small business up against established players, that is a real way in.
Efforts that also serve classic SEO
A clear structure, verifiable facts, structured data, fast pages: everything that helps a generative engine also helps Google understand and rank your pages. GEO is not one more budget line spent in vain, it is a quality bar that pays off on both fronts.
A brand recognised as an entity
Engines link a name to a specialty and a place by cross-checking sources: your website, your Google Business Profile, directories, press, your clients' sites. Identical information everywhere strengthens that link. That is why the address on our site matches our Google profile character for character.
The practical levers
- Answer first, expand afterwards. Subheadings phrased as your customers' questions, followed by a two- or three-sentence answer that stands on its own.
- Verifiable facts. In the study, adding quotations, statistics and sources were among the most effective methods. Keyword stuffing did worse than changing nothing at all.
- Structured data. Organization, Service, Article and FAQPage markup describe unambiguously who you are and what you offer.
- Let the right crawlers in. Check that your robots.txt does not block answer-engine crawlers, such as OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search or PerplexityBot. You can handle separately those that collect training data, such as GPTBot. At Google, blocking Google-Extended has no effect on your presence in Search: Googlebot is what counts.
- Content that is in the HTML. Text that only appears after JavaScript runs may go unnoticed by some crawlers. A fast site with lean code starts with a head start.
- llms.txt, without expecting miracles. This file at the site root summarises the site for language models. It is a proposed standard whose use by engines remains unproven: it costs almost nothing, but it is not a priority.
How do you measure visibility in AI answers?
Google announced on 3 June 2026 dedicated reports in Search Console, since rolled out to every site. They show how often your URLs appeared in Search's generative AI features, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, as well as in Discover, broken down by page, country, device and date. They count impressions, not clicks: they tell you whether you appear, not what it brings you.
To round it out, two simple habits: regularly ask the assistants the questions your customers ask you, noting whether you are cited; and track in your analytics the visits arriving from chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai.
What we apply, on our site and our clients'
This site applies the levers above: an “In short” summary at the top of every case study, marked-up FAQs, results with figures and sources, structured data on every page, an llms.txt file, content served directly as HTML. For our clients, the starting point remains solid SEO: georevo.ch ranks first on Google for “géomètre Lausanne”, and that is the base the citation work builds on. If you want to know where your site stands from this angle, that is what our SEO service is for.
Sources
- Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan and Deshpande, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024.
- Google Search Central, Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, 3 June 2026.
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