Definition
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving how often and how favorably AI answer engines cite and recommend your content. The term was popularized by the 2023 Princeton/Georgia Tech/IIT-Delhi paper "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" (KDD 2024), which measured how content changes — added statistics, quotations, citations — raise a page's share in generated answers, reporting relative visibility improvements of up to 40% in its benchmarks. In practice GEO spans crawler access, structured data, evidence-dense writing, entity consistency and freshness signals. A working GEO program runs as a loop: audit what engines can see, fix access and structure, rewrite key pages around quotable evidence, then track mentions and citations to verify the changes moved the numbers. GEO complements rather than replaces SEO: search rankings remain one input into what AI engines retrieve, but citation-worthiness decides what they quote.