What is generative engine optimization?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a business’s information easy for AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews to find, understand and cite in their answers. Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the closely related citation layer inside it. Both build on the same foundations as SEO: crawlable pages, clear facts and a consistent identity across the web.
GEO is about being named and cited inside AI-generated answers rather than only ranking in a list of links. AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, build their answers from pages they can crawl and sources they trust, often naming a handful of businesses and linking to a few sources. That makes GEO less a separate discipline than SEO with a different finish line. Google states that the same SEO best practices apply to its AI features and that no special markup or new machine-readable files are needed to appear in them. In practice the work is making a business’s key facts easy to find and quote: clear pages that answer the questions customers ask, consistent details across listings, reviews, and mentions on sites the assistants already draw on. Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the narrower layer inside GEO, focused on being the quoted source for a question; LLM optimization is another label for the same goal. What changes most is measurement: there is no rank position to track, so the question is whether, how often and how accurately a business is named in the answers.
Related: Local SEO & AI Visibility · AI Visibility · Google AI Overviews · Local SEO
Is GEO different from SEO?
It builds on the same foundations: crawlable pages, useful content and a consistent identity across the web, and Google says its AI features use the same SEO best practices. What changes is the goal, being cited in an answer rather than ranked in a list, and how progress is measured.
Do I need an llms.txt file for GEO?
Not for Google: it states that no new machine-readable files or AI text files are needed to appear in its AI features. Publishing one does no harm, but it is not a substitute for clear, crawlable pages.
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