# GEO

> GEO, or generative engine optimisation, means making content more likely to appear in the answers given by generative AI search.

Original page: https://t10.de/en/glossary/geo
Publisher: total10 GmbH, https://t10.de/en/glossary

The research paper ['GEO: Generative Engine Optimization'](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735), first published on 16 November 2023, introduced GEO as an approach for content creators.

Google's [guide to generative AI features](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide) makes three points. AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO are terms for work on visibility in AI search experiences, and from Google Search's perspective, optimising for generative AI search is still SEO. Many of the 'hacks' suggested for them are not effective or not supported by how Google Search actually works. Site owners need not worry if their pages lack enough long-tail keywords, because AI systems can understand synonyms and the broader meaning of what someone is looking for.

Google [says](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features) there are no additional requirements or special optimisations for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode. To be eligible as a supporting link, a page must be in Google's index and eligible to be shown with a snippet, a result's short preview text. Even meeting these conditions does not guarantee inclusion.

We treat GEO as a young field whose results are hard to measure, so we concentrate on what demonstrably works. As we see it, what visibility in AI answers takes largely overlaps with careful, substantive SEO. We focus on clear answers to real questions and verifiable facts from product data.

## See also

- [SEO](https://t10.de/en/glossary/seo): SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the work of helping search engines understand a site's content and helping people find the site through search and decide whether to visit it.
- [Structured data](https://t10.de/en/glossary/structured-data): Structured data is a standardised format for providing information about a web page and classifying its content; for Google Search it is mostly written in the Schema.org vocabulary.

## Where the term appears

- [SEO content and GEO](https://t10.de/en/seo)
- [Custom AI agents for businesses](https://t10.de/en/ai-agents)
- [The self-driving content machine](https://t10.de/en/blog/self-driving-content-machine)

## Sources

1. [GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan, Deshpande; arXiv:2311.09735, v1 16. November 2023)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735), arXiv (Cornell University), accessed 2026-11-07
2. [Leitfaden zur Optimierung für generative KI-Funktionen in der Google Suche](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide?hl=de), Google Search Central, accessed 2026-11-07
3. [KI-Funktionen und deine Website](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features?hl=de), Google Search Central, accessed 2026-11-07