The term comes from a research paper by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues, published in November 2023 and accepted at the KDD 2024 conference. The authors showed that certain text changes can raise visibility in generated answers by up to 40 percent. Citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics worked best.
GEO applies to systems such as ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. These systems first retrieve matching documents and then let a language model write the answer. That is why technical SEO remains the foundation: only pages the responsible crawler may fetch can be used as sources.
Typical GEO measures include direct answers at the top of a page, facts with evidence, clear entities and mentions on sites that AI search tools cite often. GEO is measured as the share of answers that mention a brand across many repeated prompts.
Our article What is GEO? covers the topic in depth.