GEO Guides

GEO is the work of getting a website cited as a source in the answers produced by AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews. Where SEO aims for rankings, GEO aims for citations: being the source that is named and linked inside the answer the AI writes. It does not replace SEO; it builds on a solid SEO foundation.

GEO work has four steps: make sure pages are crawlable and indexed, write content in sections that answer a question directly and make sense on their own, make author, organization and freshness visible, and finally measure AI-referred visits and brand visibility regularly. If technical SEO is weak, these steps will not deliver results on their own.

No exact formula has been published, but the common pattern is clear: pages that answer the question directly, use paragraphs that make sense on their own and show who wrote them and when they were updated tend to be cited. The page also has to be crawlable and indexed. A page that is not in the search index will not appear in AI answers either.

AEO (answer engine optimization) aims to have content used in places that give direct answers, such as Google's featured snippets and voice assistants. GEO focuses on being cited in the answers that generative AI writes in its own words. Both rest on the same foundation: well-structured, trustworthy content that answers the question clearly.

llms.txt is a proposed text file at the root of a site that summarizes its important pages for AI tools. Google states that you do not need such a file to appear in its AI features. Some tools can read it, so adding one does no harm, but it does not create visibility on its own; the priority should be crawlable, clear content.

AI Overviews are AI-generated summary answers that Google shows above the results for some searches. Each overview is compiled from several sources and links to them. A page needs no special markup or file to appear there; the basic requirement is that it is in the Google index and contains a relevant, trustworthy answer to the question.