What is GEO? How AI chooses which companies it cites
GEO — generative engine optimization — is the practice of shaping a website so that AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot choose to cite it when answering users' questions. An AI answer rests on a few sources: either your company is named in the answer, or you are not there at all. GEO is the work of landing among those sources — through citable content, structured data and consistent company information.
This page goes through what the term means, how the engines in practice choose what to build their answers on, what separates GEO from SEO and how the result is measured. If you would rather see a direct comparison of the two, GEO vs SEO is the next step; the long GEO guide walks through the whole engagement, step by step.
What does GEO mean?
The term describes a shift in how people find companies. A search used to begin with a search engine and end with a click in a results list. Today the same search often begins with a question in a chat — "which suppliers should we look at?" — and gets a finished answer with a handful of names and sources. What decides whether a company is included is not its position in a list, but whether the engines chose it as one of the sources the answer rests on.
Generative engine optimization is the work of influencing that selection. The name comes from the engines being generative: they create the answer themselves, from what they know and what they fetch. In practice GEO comes down to three things:
- Content that can be cited — clear, self-contained statements the model can reproduce outright, with a source.
- Structure that can be understood — crawlable HTML and schema.org data that make it cheap to interpret the page correctly.
- Credibility beyond the site — independent mentions confirming that the company exists and what it is good at.
GEO does not replace search engine optimization: a website that cannot be crawled, or lacks substance, is rarely cited either. But a website can rank well on Google and still never appear in AI answers — the basics are no longer enough.
How do the AI engines choose what they cite?
No engine publishes its algorithm, but the criteria governing source selection are well known and broadly fixed, engine by engine. Four of them matter most for a website:
One clear main question per page
Engines link pages to questions. A page that answers one clear question — with the answer at the top — is easier to pick for the right question than a page that touches ten topics superficially.
Citable answers
The answer must be reproducible word for word: a definition, a concrete comparison, a list answering one question per point. Vague marketing prose has nothing to cite.
Structured data
schema.org markup (Organization, Service, FAQPage) makes it cheap for the engines to understand what you do and which questions you answer — and raises the chance that the right page matches the right question.
Independent mentions
Engines more readily trust companies others talk about: customer cases, trade articles, registers and reviews. A site that only talks about itself is harder to trust.
What separates GEO from SEO?
In short: SEO makes your website visible in a results list that someone clicks away from. GEO makes you part of the answer itself — cited, named or recommended by the assistant. The difference lies in the surfaces, the measures and the content:
The two complement each other — and much of the foundation is the same. The full comparison, with what changes, what stays and when each investment pays off, is on the GEO vs SEO page.
How is the result of GEO measured?
With a fixed question set. You put together a list of the questions your buyers actually ask — about category, comparisons and suppliers — and put exactly the same questions to every AI engine. Three things are counted in each answer:
- Citations — your website is referenced as a source in the answer.
- Mentions — your company is named in the answer, with or without a link.
- Links — the answer links to your site.
Summed across the questions this gives a visibility score per engine (0–100), tracked over time. Because the same questions are asked every time, the changes are comparable: if the score rises after an optimisation you know what caused it — and in which questions you are still missing. Without a fixed question set GEO becomes guesswork; with one it becomes measurable work. Eyrie measures against five engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude) with the same question set every time, and reports the score per engine in every report.
Frequently asked questions
What does GEO mean?
GEO is short for Generative Engine Optimization. The term means the work of making a website a source that generative AI engines choose, cite and recommend in their answers. The surfaces are the same as in SEO — content, structure, technical and entity details — but the goal is to become part of the answer instead of appearing in the results list.
Is GEO part of marketing?
Yes. GEO belongs to marketing — it is the work of visibility when the buyer puts their question to an AI engine instead of searching on Google. The surfaces are the same as in SEO: content, structure, technical and entity details. The goal is different. It is not about a position in the results list but about becoming the source the AI cites in its answer. For a company, GEO becomes a channel alongside search engine optimization, not a replacement.
Is GEO the same thing as SEO?
No, but they share the foundation. SEO is about ranking high in the search engines' results; GEO is about being cited in the answer from AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Both require crawlable HTML and good content, but GEO adds the requirements of a citable answer, structured data and entity consistency on top. Read the full comparison on our GEO vs SEO page.
Which AI engines can you optimise for?
The major generative engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude. They gather information differently — some rely more on training data, others on search and fresh web pages — but the foundation is shared: reachable content, clear citable statements, structured data and consistent company information. Optimise for the foundation, then measure engine by engine.
How is AI visibility measured?
With a fixed question set: a list of the questions your buyers actually ask is put to every AI engine, and in each answer it is counted whether your website is cited, named or linked. Summed across the questions this gives a visibility score per engine, tracked over time. Eyrie measures against five engines with the same questions every time, so the changes are comparable.
What does GEO cost at Eyrie?
The initial review report is free: AI visibility score, where you are cited today, where you are missing and the first three actions. After that, a one-off GEO optimisation costs SEK 14,900 per project and ongoing monitoring SEK 6,900 per month (excluding VAT), with no lock-in. See the prices in detail.
Do you want to know where your website stands today?
Order the free review report — you get the visibility score, the gaps and the first three actions.
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