What Is GEO? How to Get Cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews

TL;DR: GEO is the work of getting your pages quoted by AI answer engines: ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews. Google says it is still SEO, and for Google that holds, because a page has to be indexed and allowed a snippet before any AI feature can touch it. The parts that are GEO and nothing else fit on one hand. Let the AI search crawlers in, keep your text in the HTML rather than behind JavaScript, and write answers that survive being quoted on their own. The free AI visibility check tells you in a minute whether the crawlers can get in at all.

Every few years search marketing coins an acronym and a fresh crowd turns up to sell it. GEO is this cycle's. Underneath the noise, though, sits a short list of things you can check, and most of them are the same things that got sites ranking in the first place.

GEO in one paragraph

Generative engine optimization is the practice of making a website easy for AI answer engines to find and cite. Someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot or Google's AI Mode a question, the system runs a search, reads a handful of pages and writes an answer with links to its sources, and GEO is the business of being one of those sources. The name comes from a 2023 paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, which measured how rewriting content changed its visibility inside generated answers. Most of the work turns out to be plain SEO, because the page still has to be crawlable, indexed, fast and clearly written. What GEO adds is attention to the things an AI system leans on harder than a results page does: its crawler has to be allowed in, the text has to sit in the HTML without a script running, and each passage has to make sense when it is lifted out and quoted alone.

Google's position: same index, same rules

Google's page on AI features and your website says the SEO practices you already know apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode, with no extra requirements beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet. There is no separate AI index to submit to. No markup unlocks a citation. A page that ranks for nothing today will not be discovered tomorrow by a feature built on the same index.

Outside Google each assistant runs its own crawler, so the picture shifts a little. OpenAI's crawler documentation says a site that blocks OAI-SearchBot will not appear in ChatGPT search answers, and Perplexity builds its own index with PerplexityBot, as its crawler documentation describes. GEO, then, is SEO plus a few extra doors that each need unlocking, plus some habits in how you write.

How an assistant picks its sources

None of the companies publish a ranking formula, but the mechanism is documented well enough to act on. The assistant takes a question, runs one or several searches against an index, fetches the most promising pages and picks the passages that answer. Google calls part of this "query fan-out": the system fires off related searches across subtopics and assembles the answer from whatever comes back, which is how a page ends up cited for a sub-question nobody targeted.

The retrieval step is still search, so everything that decides whether a page gets found and trusted in normal results still decides here. The final pick, though, happens at passage level, and that changes how you write. A long page with one excellent paragraph buried in the middle is competing with a short page whose opening paragraph answers the question outright, and the short page tends to win because its answer comes out clean without the surrounding text.

What a quotable passage looks like

It answers one question in its first sentence, names its subject rather than saying "it", and carries the specific fact the reader came for. On a made-up dental clinic's FAQ, the answer to "How much does a crown cost?" opened with two sentences about how every mouth is different. The rewrite leads with the money: a porcelain crown at the clinic costs 3,500 to 4,500 shekels, depending on the tooth and whether it needs a root canal first. An assistant can lift that sentence whole and it still holds up.

Nobody has published an official passage length. We aim for about 130 to 170 words under each heading, because that fits a full answer and its main caveat and is still short enough to be quoted whole. Answer first, edge cases last. A paragraph that only makes sense after the one above it gets skipped or misquoted.

A few habits carry most of the weight. Write the heading the way a person would type the question, so "How much does a website audit cost?" rather than "Pricing". Put prices, dates, names and places in the text, since no assistant can quote a price that lives inside an image. Keep to one idea per paragraph, and use a table for comparisons because each row stands alone. And say who wrote the page and when it was last checked, because a byline and an honest "updated" date are part of how people and machines decide whether to trust a source.

The crawlers that have to get in

This is where most GEO problems actually live. Sites block AI crawlers by accident all the time, usually through a CDN bot setting somebody switched on, or a robots.txt rule copied from a 2023 blog post about keeping content out of training data. These are the crawlers that matter for being cited, in the companies' own words.

Training crawlers are a separate decision from search crawlers. OpenAI states that its two settings are independent, so you can block GPTBot and still allow OAI-SearchBot. Google says Google-Extended has no effect on inclusion or ranking in Search. Anthropic describes its three bots in a help article. We go through the rules line by line in llms.txt and robots.txt for AI crawlers.