Where the term comes from
“Generative engine optimization” was coined in a paper by six researchers at Princeton University, IIT Delhi and elsewhere, first posted in November 2023 and published at KDD 2024, a major data-mining conference. The paper calls ChatGPT-style search tools that write an answer from several sources “generative engines”, and defines GEO as helping content creators increase their visibility in those answers.
You will also see AEO (answer engine optimization), LLMO (large language model optimization), or simply AI SEO and AI search optimization. Google’s guidance mentions AEO and GEO together as names for work on AI search visibility, without defining either; we found no authoritative definition of LLMO. In practice these names are used loosely for the same goal.
What the research measured
The paper tested nine ways of rewriting a web page and measured how much of an AI answer drew on that page:
| Change to the page | Visibility vs. unchanged |
|---|---|
| Add quotations from credible sources | +41% |
| Add statistics | +31% |
| Improve fluency | +28% |
| Cite sources | +27% |
| Keyword stuffing | −8% |
Calculated from Table 1 of the paper (position-adjusted word count); the paper itself reports the best result as a 41% improvement.
Three caveats matter before you quote these numbers:
- They are shares of an answer, not traffic. The paper measured how much of each answer came from the page, normalised so all sources add up to 100%. It did not measure clicks or sales.
- The test engine was the authors’ own. It took Google’s top five results for each question and had GPT-3.5 write the answer. Real products work differently and change often, which the paper itself lists as a limitation.
- Effects varied a lot by topic and starting position. Pages ranked fifth in Google gained far more than pages ranked first, which often lost visibility.
The durable lesson is that the changes that helped are the ones that make a page more useful and verifiable: real quotations, real figures, named sources, clear writing. Keyword stuffing did not help.
What Google says
- “Still SEO.” Google’s guide to generative AI features says optimizing for them is optimizing for the search experience, “and thus still SEO”. There are no extra technical requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet.
- Hacks don’t work. Google says many suggested AEO/GEO hacks are not effective, lists things you don’t need (llms.txt, chunking content for AI, rewriting content specially for AI), and notes that no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems.
- Manipulation is spam. Since May 2026 Google’s spam policies explicitly cover attempts to manipulate generative AI responses in Search, and mass-producing pages to cover every phrasing of a question can count as scaled content abuse.
- Think critically about GEO tools. Google’s guidance on third-party SEO services lists tools that promise improvements for AI experiences, sold as AEO or GEO tools, among the services to think critically about. Google does not evaluate or approve any of them.
- There is an opt-out. A site must be included under “Search generative AI” in Search Console to appear in these features; see AI crawlers: the list, and how to allow or block them.
What Bing says
Bing’s official Webmaster Guidelines now cover GEO. They define GEO as focusing on “content eligibility for grounding and reference in AI responses”, and say plainly that GEO does not guarantee grounding or citations. The first rule is that SEO fundamentals still apply, because Bing and Copilot rely on the same crawling, indexing and ranking foundation as traditional search.
The same guidelines list prompt injection and AI manipulation as abuse: content designed to manipulate or interfere with the language models behind Bing or Copilot may lose visibility or be removed.
What manipulation looks like
China’s CCTV showed a clear example in its annual consumer-rights programme on 15 March 2026. Reporters invented a smart wristband, used a “GEO” tool to generate promotional articles, and posted them on self-media accounts. About two hours after the first two articles went up, an AI model started describing the fake product, repeating its made-up selling points. After 11 articles over three days, two AI models recommended it near the top when asked for health wristband suggestions.
In April 2026 the Cyberspace Administration of China launched a four-month campaign against AI application abuses that names “using GEO techniques for malicious marketing” as a form of AI data poisoning.
The line is simple: publishing true, useful, sourced content on your own site and making it easy for AI to read is fine. Planting fake reviews, rankings or claims for AI to pick up is manipulation, and Google and Bing both treat it as a violation. Citeloop only does the first kind: real content with sources, published on your own site, never posts on third-party platforms.
Why it matters now
People click less when an AI answer is on the page. In Pew Research Center’s analysis of US users’ Google searches in March 2025, people clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits with an AI summary, versus 15% without one, and clicked a link inside the summary in only 1%.
That makes being cited inside the answer more important than before. Both Bing (since February 2026) and Google (since August 2026, worldwide) now report how often your pages appear in their AI features, so you can measure it instead of guessing.
What GEO work actually involves
In order of what to fix first:
- Make sure AI crawlers can get in. Check robots.txt and your CDN for each AI search crawler. See AI crawlers: the list, and how to allow or block them.
- Make sure your content is in the HTML. Not every crawler runs JavaScript, so key content should not depend on it.
- Get the SEO basics right. Clear titles and descriptions, one h1, canonicals, accurate structured data, a sitemap, and verification in Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console.
- Publish content worth citing. Answer real questions directly, add real figures and named sources, and keep claims consistent across pages.
- Measure. Check the AI reports in Bing Webmaster Tools and Search Console, and see how to verify that AI crawlers actually reach your site.
Citeloop’s free GEO audit, opening soon, will cover the first three steps.