What is GEO and why does it matter?

What the word means, and what it does not

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. The term comes from a paper presented at the KDD conference in 2024, and it applies to the engines that write the answer themselves: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and the answer box Google now puts above the ordinary results.

The difference between this and traditional search optimisation is more than wording. A search engine ranks pages and lets the person choose. A generative engine reads a few pages, writes one answer, and names its sources. In the first case you are competing for a place on a list. In the second you are competing to be the source, and that is not the same contest.

Google says established SEO best practices still apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode. Special markup is not required to be eligible for those results.

Where your business knowledge matters

You know your own offer. Specific answers about facilities, prices, policies and location give visitors and search systems useful information to work with.

Start with the questions you get on the phone. If the answers are missing from the site, adding them makes it more useful regardless of where the next visitor comes from.

Are dogs welcome? Are you open in January? What does breakfast cost? Keep the answers accurate, clear and current. Do not add facts you cannot verify just to cover more keywords.

What is actually measured, and what is guesswork

The GEO paper accepted at KDD 2024 reported visibility improvements of up to 40% in the authors’ evaluation setting, varying by domain. That is a research result, not a forecast for your business.

Keywords help you use your customer’s language. Unnecessary repetition makes copy harder to read. Write useful answers first.

It matters just as much to say what is not known. Most of the GEO statistics in circulation come from companies selling GEO services, and they are chosen to make the subject look urgent. I hold to three things: primary sources, large neutral datasets, and my own counts. What does not survive that filter does not make it into what I tell you on the phone.

Check what arrives with the page

Crawlers and answer engines retrieve content in different ways. It is useful to check whether essential information is present in the page’s initial HTML response.

If content appears only after JavaScript runs, check its accessibility separately. It is not automatically invisible, but retrieval can depend on the system fetching the page.

Inspect what is returned without opening the site in a browser. If essential details are absent, making them part of the initial response can be a useful improvement.

Five things you can fix yourself today

Answer the question in the first sentence under the heading. A machine looking for an answer takes what is there immediately, not what arrives after three paragraphs of throat-clearing.

Put the numbers in the text. Prices, distances, opening hours, how many rooms, how many people fit. A number is quotable, an adjective is not, and "a short walk from the centre" answers nothing.

Write headings that are the questions themselves. Not "Facilities" but "Is there a hot tub?". The machine is matching a question to a question.

Name the source when you assert something somebody else established, and link to it. It costs nothing, it is good manners, and it has a measurable effect.

Take the opening hours, the prices and the location out of images and PDFs and put them in text. A photograph of a sign is not opening hours, and a price list in a PDF is not a page.

What I do not promise

I do not promise that ChatGPT will name you. Nobody controls that, the answers are not the same twice, and anyone promising it is selling something they do not own.

I do not promise this will be your main source of revenue next month either. Traffic from AI assistants is still a small share of the total for an ordinary site. This is the edge that is growing quickly, not the foundation, and anyone telling you to stop thinking about Google is exaggerating in order to sell.

My work starts with readability, content and technical setup. Monthly review comes with the Visibility plan. The website scan does not count AI mentions; that additional measurement is still in development.

Sources and dates

• The GEO paper and results from the authors’ evaluation setting: GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, arXiv 2311.09735 ↗
• Citation results depend on the system, queries and measurement period. No general performance increase is promised here.
• The technical advice here is to make key information available in the initial page response and test retrieval. It is not a claim about every answer engine’s capabilities.
• How Google itself describes the answer box and what can appear in it: Google Search Central, AI features and your website ↗
• The current Icelandic comparison sample is on /maeling and uses 629 tourism websites that responded on 13 September 2026.