Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of getting your business cited inside answers written by AI, such as Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity. It is not a replacement for SEO. Google says optimising for its AI features is still SEO, and when we checked 498 Australian marketing searches, Google returned an AI Overview for 433 of them.
We do this work for clients as a GEO agency, so this guide is written from the practice side: where the term came from, what the research behind it found, what really changes from SEO and what doesn't, and three Australian searches where Google's AI answer and its ranked results picked different pages.
What is generative engine optimisation?
Generative engine optimisation is making your pages easy for an AI search tool to find, trust and quote. A generative engine is any search tool that writes an answer instead of only listing links: Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Claude. You will also see it spelled generative engine optimization, the US spelling, and sold under other names such as AI SEO and answer engine optimisation (AEO).
The term comes from a research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, by researchers at Princeton University and IIT Delhi. It was first posted in November 2023 and published at KDD 2024, the ACM's conference on knowledge discovery and data mining. Its question was a practical one: when an AI writes the answer, what can a website owner change to be quoted more often?
Is generative engine optimisation a thing?
Yes, as research and as a name for real work, but not as a discipline separate from SEO. The research is solid: the paper rewrote web pages nine different ways and measured how often each version was quoted across a benchmark of 10,000 queries.
Three changes did best: citing sources, adding quotations from credible sources, and adding statistics. On the paper's main measure, each lifted a page's visibility in the AI answers by roughly 30 to 40 percent. Keyword stuffing, one of the oldest SEO habits, did little or nothing. On Perplexity, a live AI search engine, adding quotations lifted visibility by 22 percent, and keyword stuffing made it 10 percent worse.
The finding that matters most for smaller businesses was about rank. The gains were biggest for pages that ranked lower in the search results. Citing sources lifted visibility by 115 percent for websites ranked fifth, while the same change cost the top-ranked website 30 percent of its visibility on average. In a written answer, a well-sourced page from further down the list can take the space.
Two cautions. The study used an engine built on GPT-3.5 and was finished in 2024, and its authors say the methods may need to change as AI engines change. And Google's own view, in its guide to optimising for generative AI features (updated 10 July 2026), is that from Google Search's point of view, optimising for AI search is optimising for the search experience, and so still SEO.
GEO vs SEO: what changes and what doesn't
What changes is the prize. SEO competes for a ranked link to a whole page. GEO competes for a sentence, a fact or a mention inside an answer that, in our data, typically cites eight links. What doesn't change is everything underneath: an AI engine can only quote a page its crawler can reach and its index holds.
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| What you win | A ranked link to your page | A citation or mention inside an AI answer |
| Where it shows | Google and Bing results pages | AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini and Claude |
| How sources are chosen | Ranking systems order whole pages | The engine searches its index, often running several related searches at once, then quotes the passages that support its answer |
| What earns it | Crawlable, indexable pages, relevance, links and a good page experience | All of that, plus passages that answer plainly, with sources, numbers and quotations |
| Crawlers to allow | Googlebot and Bingbot | Also OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot |
| How you measure it | Clicks, impressions and positions in Search Console | Search Console's Generative AI performance report, GA4's AI Assistant channel and Bing's AI Performance report |
Sources: Google Search Central (updated 10 July 2026); OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic crawler documentation; Google Analytics and Bing Webmaster Tools announcements. All checked 1 October 2026.
The foundations are not optional. Google will only link a page from AI Overviews or AI Mode if it has indexed that page and could show it with a snippet in ordinary results, and it says no special files, markup or schema are needed. Since 31 August 2026 every Search Console property has also had a Search generative AI setting. It starts on Include, and choosing Exclude takes your pages out of those features.
What Australian searches show about GEO
Being cited and being ranked are now separate wins. In our October 2026 study of 498 Australian marketing searches, roughly two in every three links cited by AI Overviews came from pages outside Google's top 10 for that search. The full numbers and method are in our AI Overviews study. Three searches about GEO itself show the split clearly.
- "generative engine optimisation". The AI Overview cited six sources: Wikipedia, Coursera, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Deloitte and Business.com. None of the six appeared in the 19 organic results we recorded, which included two Australian agency explainers in the top 10.
- "geo agency". All eight organic results on the page came from a single site publishing "best GEO agency" lists. The AI Overview above them cited seven different pages, five of them on .com.au agency sites, and none of the seven appeared in the organic results.
- "geo vs seo". Five of the top ten organic results were Australian .com.au sites. The AI Overview cited ten links, mostly overseas sites and platforms such as Semrush, Reddit, LinkedIn and YouTube, and just one Australian page, which did not appear anywhere in the 19 organic results we recorded.
The lesson is not that rankings stopped mattering. The AI answer picks passages from a wider pool than the page-one list, so a clear, specific page that ranks 15th can still be the one quoted, and a page that ranks third can be left out.
What is a GEO agency?
A GEO agency sells work aimed at getting a business cited or named in AI answers. In practice it is the same job an AEO agency or an AI SEO agency sells: crawler access, consistent facts about the business, markup that agrees with what the page says, and content worth quoting, with some way of measuring the result. The label tells you very little, so ask what they will change on your site and how they will measure it.
Google makes the same point from the other side. Its guide tells site owners weighing third-party "AEO" or "GEO" services to review its guidance on evaluating SEO advice. That is a fair test: a GEO agency that can't explain its work in plain SEO terms is selling the acronym.
What is the best GEO agency?
There is no reliable ranking of GEO agencies, so judge them on method. On the day we checked, every organic result for "geo agency" in Australia came from one site publishing lists of best GEO agencies, which tells you what those lists are worth. Put these questions to any agency you are considering:
- Will you check our indexing and crawler access first, including OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot?
- Will you treat AI training crawlers as a separate decision from AI search crawlers?
- How will you measure results: Search Console's Generative AI performance report, GA4's AI Assistant channel and our enquiries?
- Do you sell llms.txt files or "chunking" content as ranking tactics? Google lists both among the things you can ignore for its search.
- Will you promise we get named by ChatGPT? Nobody controls that, so a promise is a warning.
- Will you publish fewer pages with original numbers, or a page for every variation of a question? Google says making pages for every follow-up query in order to manipulate AI answers breaches its scaled content abuse policy.
Can ChatGPT do SEO?
ChatGPT can do parts of the work, not the job. It is quick at drafting outlines, grouping questions, suggesting structured data and summarising what competing pages cover. It cannot get your page indexed, earn the links and mentions that make a business a trusted source, or know whether your numbers are right.
There is also a catch specific to GEO. Google's guide asks for non-commodity content and warns against recycling what others have said or what "could easily be produced by a generative AI model". If ChatGPT could write your page from what is already online, an AI answer has no reason to quote you instead of the sources it already has. Use it for speed, and put your own experience and data on the page.
Will GEO replace SEO?
No. Google says its AI features are rooted in its core ranking and quality systems, and they pull pages from the same index as ordinary search. ChatGPT finds pages for its search answers with OpenAI's own search crawler, and Copilot's citations are reported through Bing Webmaster Tools. Each of these AI search answers starts with a search step, so the SEO foundations carry over, and GEO adds the work of being the passage worth quoting.
How to start with generative engine optimisation
- Check you can be found. Confirm your key pages are indexed, your robots.txt lets the AI search crawlers in, and the Search generative AI setting in Search Console is on Include.
- List the questions buyers ask before they hire you. Cost, timeframes, process and fit. Answer each one in the first two sentences of its own section.
- Add what gets quoted. Sources, numbers with a date, and quotations from people with standing. Your own data beats a summary of everyone else's.
- Make your facts match everywhere. Trading name, legal name, ABN, locations and services should read the same on your site, in your structured data and on every profile.
- Measure it. Search Console's Generative AI performance report for AI Overview and AI Mode impressions, GA4's AI Assistant channel for visits, and your enquiries for the result.
Our guide to getting cited by ChatGPT and AI Overviews covers each engine and the GA4 set-up in detail, and AEO vs SEO covers structured data and what llms.txt does and doesn't do.
Want GEO run for you and judged on enquiries? Our AI SEO agency page sets out how we work. Or book a free profit audit, bring one question your buyers ask, and in 30 minutes we will look at who gets cited for it and why.
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