A small accounting firm notices that prospects increasingly say “ChatGPT recommended you” or “Google’s AI summary linked your guide.” The firm wants that to happen more often. Making a page easy for an answer engine to find, understand and quote is generative engine optimization. Some marketers call it answer engine optimization (AEO); the two names are used for the same idea.
The term comes from a 2023 paper by Aggarwal and colleagues, who built a benchmark of search queries and tested how rewriting source pages changed how often a generative engine used them. In their experiments, adding citations to credible sources, quotations and statistics increased a page’s visibility in generated answers by up to 40%, while keyword stuffing did little. Those are results from a research setup, not guarantees about any commercial product, whose ranking and citation rules are not public and change often.
Google’s own guidance is blunter: the same search engine optimization practices that work for regular search apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode, and no special AI markup or AI-specific text file is required to appear in them. In practice that means pages that are crawlable, clearly structured, specific, accurate and from a source people can identify, with facts stated plainly enough to quote.
Why it matters (editorial synthesis): as more questions are answered inside an AI response, being cited in that response becomes part of how people discover a business or publication. Treat GEO advice with caution, though. Much of it is vendor marketing, measurement is hard because answers vary from run to run, and tactics aimed at manipulating a model can backfire if the engine treats them as spam. The durable approach is the one the research and Google’s guidance agree on: useful, well-sourced content that answers real questions directly.
No Chain of Thought guest has discussed GEO in depth yet, so this entry relies on the original paper and Google’s documentation.
Sources
- Aggarwal et al.: GEO: Generative Engine Optimization — The paper that named GEO: introduces a benchmark of queries and reports that methods such as adding citations, quotations and statistics raised a source's visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40% in its tests; checked October 24, 2026.
- Google Search Central: AI features and your website — Google says the same SEO best practices apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that no special optimization, AI text files or new markup are needed to appear in them; checked October 24, 2026.