What is generative engine optimization?

An AI answer about a company can draw from the company’s site, independent coverage, reference pages, product documentation, forums, and search indexes. GEO starts by checking whether those sources identify the same company and support the statements a buyer needs.

A company cannot edit an AI model directly. It can correct its public facts, publish missing supporting information, make useful pages crawlable, and resolve contradictions that leave a search service guessing.

SEO helps search engines discover, understand, and present web pages. GEO uses the same foundation. Google’s SEO Starter Guide recommends crawlable links, descriptive pages, useful content, and clear site organization. Those changes also give AI search services better public material to work with.

The measurement is different. SEO often looks at indexed pages and search results. GEO also records generated answers: whether the company appears, how it is described, which alternatives appear beside it, and which sources support the response.

1. Correct the facts.Use one current name, category, product description, and ownership record across the pages that define the company.
2. Publish supporting information.Put specifications, methods, policies, authorship, dates, and primary documents where a reader can inspect them.
3. Give each page one job.Use a canonical page for each distinct question instead of repeating the same answer across keyword variants.
4. Connect the entity.Make the relationship among the company, products, people, profiles, and controlled domains explicit.
5. Verify the result.Rerun the saved questions after the corrected pages are public and discoverable.

AI companies publish separate controls for different uses. OpenAI says publishers that want pages surfaced and cited in ChatGPT search should allow OAI-SearchBot; it documents GPTBot separately for potential training. Anthropic documents distinct bots for training, search, and user-directed retrieval. Perplexity identifies PerplexityBot as its search crawler.

A publisher can allow search retrieval while setting a different policy for training. The current bot documentation should be checked before changing robots.txt. Authentication, rather than a crawler rule, protects private reports and customer data.

There is no universal AI rank. Answers vary by service, question, date, source set, and user context. A useful measurement therefore saves enough of the test to explain what changed.

• Use a defined question set tied to real company and category decisions.
• Run the same questions across more than one relevant service.
• Keep the answers and citations rather than only a summary score.
• Separate mentions, recommendations, source citations, factual accuracy, and competitor appearances.
• Repeat the same bounded test after a material public change.

The result is a sample. It cannot represent every private conversation, and it should not be sold as one.

Good GEO leaves the public record more useful to a person reading it. Hidden crawler-only claims, fabricated reviews, fake consensus, and unsupported markup fail that test. So does a promise that a company can control what a model will recommend.

Publish facts that can be checked, make the right source easy to find, retain material criticism and limits, then measure the result without changing the test to win the chart.