Glossary
What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?
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GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the set of measures that prepares a website’s content so that language models and AI search engines find it, understand it and cite it in their answers.
Where classic SEO targets positions in a results list, GEO targets the answer itself: being cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews wins the contact without a click ever happening. The levers differ: machine readability without JavaScript, structured data, curated entry points such as llms.txt, and sentences that answer a question directly and verifiably.
Measurability is the hard part: citations inside AI answers appear in no classic statistic. In practice, GEO becomes measurable through the crawl statistics in Search Console and Bing, and through repeated sampling of the answer systems themselves.
Why it matters for the mid-market
For mid-market companies, GEO is the second visibility beside Google: decision-makers increasingly ask a language model instead of a results list, and whoever is absent there does not exist in that shortlist. Entry costs are low because most levers are technical and editorial, not advertising budget.