The short answer
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of optimizing your content so generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews mention and cite your brand inside the answers they generate. In practice, GEO and answer engine optimization (AEO) describe the same discipline under different names: both aim to make your content reachable by AI crawlers, easy to extract an answer from, and authoritative enough to be cited, rather than ranking a page in a list of links.
GEO and AEO are the same discipline
The terms differ, the work does not. Whether you call it GEO or AEO, the goal is to become one of the few sources a generative engine quotes when it composes an answer. Both rely on the same three levers: letting AI crawlers reach your pages, structuring the page so the answer is easy to extract, and building the authority and entity signals that lead an engine to trust you. Some practitioners prefer “generative” because the engines generate text; others prefer “answer” because the output is an answer. Pick whichever term your team uses and keep the work identical.
What GEO asks you to do
Allow the AI user agents through robots.txt and publish an llms.txt and clean sitemap so engines can read you. Lead each page with a direct answer, mark it up with clear headings and JSON-LD, and back it with corroborating pages and real authority. These are the same moves that earn citations in any generative engine.
How GEO is measured
Because the outcome is identical, you measure GEO the same way as AEO: run your category’s prompts against the engines and record citation rate, share of model, and sentiment per engine. Those numbers tell you whether the engines are generating answers that name you.
For the full primer, see what is AEO, or the AEO vs traditional SEO comparison. To see where your site stands in generative answers, run the free AI visibility scan.