GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Getting Cited by AI

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) refers to the practices aimed at making content understandable, reliable and citable by engines that generate answers using artificial intelligence: Google's AI overviews, conversational assistants and answer engines. The term is recent and the discipline is evolving quickly.

SEO and GEO: two related approaches

In classic SEO, the goal is to earn a click from a list of links. With generated answers, users often read a summary and only click if they want to go deeper. Your goal also becomes being a source that is selected and mentioned in that summary. The basics stay the same: an accessible site, useful content and a solid reputation.

What Google says about AI overviews

To appear as a link in Google's AI overviews, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet in Search. Google states there is no additional special markup or optimization to add: standard SEO best practices apply.

Concrete actions

• Answer directly: put a clear, concise answer right under headings phrased as questions, then elaborate.
• Structure your content with explicit headings, lists, tables and definitions that are easy to extract.
• Bring original information: your own data, lived examples, expert input. Content that repeats what everyone says has little reason to be cited.
• Clarify who you are: identified authors, an "About" page, a consistent brand name across the web.
• Use structured data (schema.org) when it matches the visible content.
• Allow the crawlers you want to use your content in your robots.txt file, and check that they aren't blocked by mistake.
• Build your reputation: mentions, reviews, links from recognized sources.
• Keep content up to date: update dates, refreshed figures.

Measuring

Measurement is still imperfect. You can regularly test your key queries in AI assistants, note whether your brand or site is cited, and track referral traffic from these platforms in your analytics.

Key takeaway

Nobody can guarantee being cited by an AI. The best strategy is to stay faithful to the fundamentals: be genuinely useful, clear and trustworthy, then present your content so that machines, like humans, understand it easily.