--- title: "What Is Generative Engine Optimization? GEO vs SEO — Dardo" description: "Generative engine optimization (GEO) means getting your pages quoted in AI answers. Where the term comes from, GEO vs SEO, and the site changes that matter." url: "https://dardo.studio/en/blog/generative-engine-optimization/" language: "en" translations: {"es":"https://dardo.studio/es/blog/que-es-geo-generative-engine-optimization/","pt":"https://dardo.studio/pt/blog/o-que-e-geo-generative-engine-optimization/"} updated: "2026-11-12T23:22:42.713Z" --- [Blog](https://dardo.studio/en/blog/) # What is generative engine optimization (GEO)? The definition, GEO vs SEO, and what to change on your site Generative engine optimization (GEO) makes your pages the sources AI answers quote. Where the term comes from, how it differs from SEO and what to change. By [Nicolás Cerón](https://dardo.studio/en/nicolas-ceron/) · November 12, 2026 ![A dark old library at night, shelves of leather books under a brass reading lamp, with one deep crimson book pulled halfway out of the lit row.](https://dardo.studio/_astro/01M790YXZ37WGGTB9V5T6ZTS37_FEyc4.webp) ## Key takeaways - Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of making a website's pages the sources AI answer engines retrieve, quote and link when they write an answer. - The term comes from a 2023 paper by researchers at Princeton University and IIT Delhi, published at KDD 2024, which reported visibility gains of up to 40% in its own benchmark. - In that benchmark, adding sources, quotations and statistics helped; stuffing in the query's keywords did not. - Google's own guide, last updated 10 July 2026, says optimizing for its generative AI features "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO". - What GEO adds to SEO: let AI search crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot in, put facts in plain HTML, answer first, and earn genuine mentions on sites the engines already cite. - Measure it with Search Console's Generative AI performance report, Bing's AI Performance report and a fixed set of prompts read once a month. ## The short answer Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of making your website's pages the sources that AI answer engines, such as ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, retrieve, quote and link when they write an answer. A search engine ranks pages in a list; a generative engine reads a handful of pages and writes one answer from them, so the goal moves from "rank this page" to "be one of the sources the answer is built on". In practice, GEO is SEO plus three things: letting the AI search crawlers in, writing facts a machine can quote with confidence, and being mentioned on the sites those engines already trust. This page is the definition. For the step-by-step, platform by platform, read [how to appear in AI answers](https://dardo.studio/en/blog/appear-in-ai-answers/). ## Where the term comes from The name comes from a research paper, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization", by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande, researchers at Princeton University and IIT Delhi. It was first posted in November 2023 and published at KDD 2024, the ACM's data mining conference in Barcelona. The authors built GEO-bench, 10,000 queries from 25 domains, and a test engine that answered each query from the top five Google results using GPT-3.5. They then rewrote one source page per query in nine different ways and measured how much of the answer that page earned. What they found: - **Adding citations, quotations and statistics helped most.** The best methods improved visibility by up to 40% over the unedited page on their main measure. - **Keyword stuffing didn't work.** Repeating the query's words, the classic SEO trick, performed worse than the baseline. - **Results varied by subject.** What helped a history question didn't always help a law or science question. - **The effect held on a real engine.** On Perplexity they measured improvements of up to 37%. Treat those numbers as a lab result: a 2023 model answering from five Google results is not today's ChatGPT or AI Mode. The direction has held up, though: pages that state checkable facts, with their sources, are easier for an answer engine to use. Generative engine optimization (GEO) Want Dardo to do this for you? Tell us what you need. Nico replies personally within one business day. From USD 299 a month [Get a proposal](https://dardo.studio/en/contact/?service=ai-search-optimization) · [See the service](https://dardo.studio/en/services/ai-search-optimization/) ## GEO vs SEO GEO doesn't replace SEO; it adds a second place to win. The table shows what changes. | | SEO | GEO | | ------------------ | --------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | The goal | Rank a page in a list of links | Be retrieved, quoted and linked inside a written answer | | Where it shows | Google and Bing results | ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode | | Who reads the page | Googlebot and Bingbot | The same, plus each AI company's search crawler, such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot | | What gets used | The whole page, through its title and snippet | A passage, a figure or a sentence from the page | | How you measure it | Clicks, impressions and positions in Search Console | Citations and mentions in answers; Search Console's Generative AI report; Bing's AI Performance report | | What moves it | Relevance, links and technical health | The same, plus quotable facts and genuine mentions on other sites | The overlap is large because most answer engines start from a search index. Google says its AI Overviews and AI Mode use retrieval from its core Search ranking systems and "query fan-out", a set of related searches the model runs in parallel to gather more pages. A page that doesn't rank for any of those searches is unlikely to be read. ## What Google says about GEO Google answers the question directly in its guide to generative AI search, last updated on 10 July 2026: "From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." The guide adds two eligibility rules for Google's AI features: - The page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. - The site must be included in Search generative AI features in Search Console. Inclusion is the default; the control, rolled out to all sites by 31 August 2026, lets an owner opt out. The same guide lists "hacks" Google Search ignores: llms.txt files and other special markup, "chunking" content into tiny pieces, rewriting pages just for AI, seeking inauthentic mentions, and special structured data. It also warns that creating separate pages for every variation of a question, to manipulate AI responses, "violates Google's scaled content abuse spam policy". Other engines document less. OpenAI's crawler page is the clearest statement outside Google: "Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links." ## What GEO adds to SEO: eight site-level actions These are the changes that apply to almost any business site. Each one helps people too, which is why it also survives Google's rules. 1. **Let the AI search crawlers in.** Allow OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot and Googlebot in robots.txt, and check that your firewall or CDN isn't blocking them anyway. You can allow search crawlers while blocking training crawlers such as GPTBot; OpenAI treats the two settings independently. Our [AI visibility checker](https://dardo.studio/en/tools/ai-visibility-checker/) tests each crawler against your robots.txt. 2. **Put your facts in plain HTML.** Prices, plans, service area, team size, process, policies: each on a page with its own address, in text the server sends, not text that appears only after JavaScript runs. Dardo publishes its own on a [facts page](https://dardo.studio/en/facts/). 3. **Answer first.** Open each page and each section with the answer in one to three sentences, with the number, the year and the name in it, then explain. 4. **Show your sources.** The paper's strongest methods were citations, quotations and statistics. Link the primary source for each claim, and quote your own measurements with their dates. 5. **Write one page per real question.** A clear page that matches the question beats ten near-duplicates, and Google treats mass-produced variants as spam. 6. **Say who you are in the quotable sentences.** "Dardo is a team of three in Bogotá" survives being lifted out of context; "we are a small team" doesn't. 7. **Earn genuine mentions.** Answer engines read directories, reviews, roundups and forums. Correct what they say about you, and get listed where buyers in your category already look. Buying mentions doesn't help: Google's guide calls inauthentic mentions out by name. 8. **Keep structured data for what it does.** It makes pages eligible for rich results in Google; there is no special schema for AI answers. An llms.txt file is optional; see [what llms.txt is and who reads it](https://dardo.studio/en/blog/llms-txt/). ## How to measure GEO Answers change from one day to the next, so measure trends, not single answers. - **Search Console's Generative AI performance report** shows impressions from Google's AI features for your site. - **Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report**, in public preview since February 2026, shows how often Copilot and Bing's AI answers cite your pages. - **A fixed prompt panel:** 30 to 50 questions your buyers ask, run on the same engines once a month, counting whether your brand is named and whether your site is cited, separately. - **Your contact form:** ask "How did you hear about us?" with an AI assistant as an option. Many AI visits arrive without a referrer, so analytics alone undercounts them. Be careful with any tool that promises a single "AI visibility score". Google's guide says it plainly: "No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems." ## What GEO can't promise Nobody controls what an answer engine writes. Engines change models and sources without notice, the same question can return different brands on different days, and an unknown brand with no mentions elsewhere rarely appears however well its own pages are written. GEO raises the odds that your pages are read and quoted; it doesn't guarantee it. ## How Dardo works on GEO Dardo's [generative engine optimization service](https://dardo.studio/en/services/ai-search-optimization/) starts with an AI visibility audit, from USD 690 one-time: crawler access, how your facts read to a machine, what answer engines say about you today and where they get it. Monthly tracking with a prompt panel and reporting starts at USD 299 a month. The technical side of GEO overlaps with [SEO](https://dardo.studio/en/services/seo/), and most fixes land in the same pull request. ## Common questions **Is GEO the same as AEO?** Mostly. AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) both describe work aimed at appearing in AI-written answers. Google's guide treats them together and says that, for Google Search, both are still SEO. GEO is the term from the 2023 research paper; AEO is older and was also used for featured snippets and voice answers. **Is GEO replacing SEO?** No. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode retrieve pages through its core Search ranking systems, and a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet to appear in them. ChatGPT search and Perplexity also fetch pages from the open web. GEO adds steps to SEO; it doesn't remove any. **Does llms.txt help with GEO?** Not on Google. Google's guide says Google Search doesn't use llms.txt files and that creating one "will neither harm nor help" a site's visibility in Google Search. It can still be useful for developer tools that read it; our llms.txt guide covers who reads it. **How long does GEO take to show results?** There is no published timeline. Answers change daily, so judge a change over weeks, not days: compare a fixed set of prompts month to month and watch Search Console's Generative AI performance report. A crawler block fixed in robots.txt is the fastest win; OpenAI says its systems take about 24 hours to adjust to a robots.txt change. **How do I check whether AI crawlers can read my site?** Read your robots.txt for the AI crawlers' user agents (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot) and check your firewall or CDN bot settings, which can block them even when robots.txt allows them. Dardo's free AI visibility checker tests a site's robots.txt for each crawler and reads its llms.txt, sitemap and home page data. ## Sources & further reading Sources behind this page, with further detail from the original publishers. - [arXiv: GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735) · arxiv.org - [Google Search Central: Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide) · developers.google.com - [Google Search Central: AI features and your website](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features) · developers.google.com - [Search Console Help: Search generative AI control](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16908024) · support.google.com - [Search Console Help: Generative AI performance report](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16984139) · support.google.com - [Google Search Central: Guidance on using generative AI content](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/using-gen-ai-content) · developers.google.com - [Google Search Central: Spam policies (scaled content abuse)](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies) · developers.google.com - [OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots) · developers.openai.com - [Bing Webmaster Blog: Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools](https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2026/2/Introducing-AI-Performance-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Public-Preview/) · blogs.bing.com - [Dardo: AI visibility checker](https://dardo.studio/en/tools/ai-visibility-checker/) · dardo.studio [Nicolás Cerón](https://dardo.studio/en/nicolas-ceron/) Nicolás Cerón is the founder of Dardo and a senior frontend engineer. Before starting Dardo, a web design and development studio in Bogotá, Colombia, he worked as a frontend engineer at a Y Combinator–backed startup. ## Related articles - [**How to show up in AI answers in 2026: what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google and Copilot actually document**There is no switch for appearing in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews or Copilot. Here is what each platform documents about being cited, and how to measure it without guessing.](https://dardo.studio/en/blog/appear-in-ai-answers/) - [**llms.txt: what it is, who actually reads it, an example to copy and how to validate it**llms.txt is a Markdown guide to your site for AI agents. Google Search ignores it; coding agents use it. The format, a template and how to validate it.](https://dardo.studio/en/blog/llms-txt/) - [**Best generative engine optimization (GEO) agencies compared: 6 options by method, pricing and proof**Six agencies that sell generative engine optimization, compared on how they measure AI answers, what they publish about price, where they work and their proof.](https://dardo.studio/en/blog/best-generative-engine-optimization-agencies/) - [**How much does SEO cost? US agency prices, audits, hourly rates and what a small business pays per month**US agencies that publish SEO prices start at $299 to $5,000 a month; Clutch puts US firms at $100 to $149 an hour. What each price buys, and what to avoid.](https://dardo.studio/en/blog/seo-cost/) ## Keep exploring. - [Service · **Generative engine optimization (GEO)**](https://dardo.studio/en/services/ai-search-optimization/) - [Your project · **Start a conversation**](https://dardo.studio/en/contact/)