What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
Last updated: 9/3/2025
Don’t let the name confuse you, GEO has nothing to do with the Earth. Generative engine optimization (GEO), is a new term growing in popularity within marketing teams, but what is it and is it necessary?
Let’s dive in.
What is GEO?
Generative engine optimization is the practice of optimizing a website to appear in AI search results. AI answer engines function differently than traditional search engines. Rather than rank websites based on factors like keywords and technical metrics, answer engines find information they deem relevant to a user’s query and generate a unique answer. As the name implies, GEO is all about optimizing a website to ensure that its content makes it into the responses that answer engines generate. With the popularity of AI search making it less likely for searchers to end up directly on a website, many marketers are turning to GEO to make sure their brand is being referenced in an answer engine’s list of sources.
How is it done?
Like SEO, GEO involves ongoing improvements to certain areas of a website. While the models that drive answer engines are constantly evolving, there are certain attributes that they consistently look for when sourcing answers. A well-positioned GEO strategy optimizes for these characteristics while staying adaptable to new changes in answer engine models.
What are the best practices?
Keep your content fresh
Most answer engines re-rank their search results to favor recent content. Keep producing content that is relevant to your audience, and be sure to regularly refresh content that has been on your site for over a year or two.
Demonstrate authority
Answer engines are more likely to cite your material in the answers that they generate if your brand demonstrates clear authority in the subject matter. You can establish credibility for your brand by:
- Securing backlinks to reputable sites
- Obtaining more favorable reviews on third-party platforms
- Achieving awards and certifications within your industry
- Maintaining clear “knowledge-bases” of content for your desired topics
Use semantic structure
An answer engine will be more likely to reference your content (and reference it well) if it follows a coherent semantic structure. When building pages, make sure that your headings are worded clearly and use the proper HTML elements. Breaking your information into digestible “chunks” and utilizing a structured data framework like schema.org will make your content easily interpretable by AI crawlers.
Create content that is meaningful to your audience
A key way to show up in a generative answer to have content that addresses real questions that your target audience is asking. For more information about this, check out our post about Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
How does it relate to SEO?
Though they operate at a higher level of sophistication, answer engines still currently get their information from web searches. This means that SEO best practices are still essential for GEO. However, to implement GEO well, it is important to go above and beyond SEO and create content that is semantically organized and easy to digest.
The Internet is a quickly-evolving place, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. If you follow this one key principle “make content that is easy to understand and practically helps people,” then you will be prepared for the coming changes in the digital marketing industry.
If you have more questions about AI for marketing, check out the AI section of our FAQ page.