What is GEO (generative engine optimisation)?
GEO sits one level above AEO. AEO asks whether a page is quotable; GEO asks whether the assistants can reach your site at all, whether they are sure who you are, and whether anyone arrives from them.
The short answer
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the set of things that decide whether generative AI assistants can use your website: whether their crawlers may read it, whether the site tells them who it is, whether they cite it, and whether they send you visitors. It is a site-level concern; AEO is the page-level one.
Six things to watch
- AI crawlers. Answer bots (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, PerplexityBot) fetch pages to cite them; training bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) copy text to train models. Your robots.txt decides, bot by bot. Blocking a training bot is a choice; blocking an answer bot removes you from answers. See AI crawlers and robots.txt.
- llms.txt. A short Markdown map of the site at
/llms.txtthat answer bots can read in one request. See llms.txt. - Visits from assistants. In GA4, sessions whose source is chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai, gemini.google.com or copilot. Small numbers today, and the only ground truth about whether any of this matters for you yet.
- AI Overviews. For the queries you care about: is there an AI Overview, and does it cite you? See AI Overviews.
- Answer gaps. Questions where assistants name a competitor and not you. Each one is a page you could write.
- Entity signals. Organization schema with
sameAslinks to your profiles, a consistent name, address and phone, an About page that says who runs the site. The things that make an assistant sure it is talking about you and not a namesake.
What GEO is not
It is not a trick and it is not a score. Nobody can promise that an assistant will mention you. What you can do is remove every reason it would not: access, identity, quotable pages, and pages for the questions it currently answers with someone else.
MonoRanks puts all six on one screen per website, with the crawler rules and llms.txt ready to use; on WordPress it can write them for you. See GEO readiness.
Sources
Common questions
Is GEO the same as AEO?
No. AEO is per page (can this be quoted). GEO is per site (can they read it, do they know who we are, do they send visitors).
Does GEO affect Google rankings?
Not directly. The crawler rules involved never touch Googlebot. AI Overviews are part of Google Search, and being cited there is a GEO outcome.
Where do I start?
Check robots.txt for the AI bots, publish an llms.txt, add Organization schema with sameAs, then look at GA4 for visits from assistants.
About one email a month
What changed in search and AI answers, from what we see in audits. No card, no pitch, one click to leave.