As generative AI reshapes how people research, learn, and make decisions, a new discipline is emerging: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). With millions of consumers now turning to generative engines instead of search engines, GEO is fast becoming essential for marketing and PR professionals looking to influence how their brand shows up — just as SEO helped brands get discovered on Google, GEO ensures they appear accurately and positively within AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.
This article will give you an introduction to the new GEO era, and how you can use it to make sure your brand is featured positively in AI platforms.
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What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of ensuring that AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Llama, etc., provide accurate, positive, and up-to-date information about your brand when users ask questions. These platforms are referred to as Generative Engines, Answer Engines, or Large Language Models (LLMs). They are increasingly used by consumers to research purchases and make decisions.
GEO is a way of making sure that AI platforms give people the right information about a company’s brand and products.
For example, if a person asks ChatGPT: “What is a good family car for camping trips?” then the auto manufacturers would want ChatGPT to suggest their SUV models, and list the benefits. To make sure that happens, the auto brands need to use GEO.
The practice of GEO involves several steps, but it is mostly focused on creating, structuring, and publishing content in the best way to influence the responses given by AI Generative Engines.
Why Should We Care About GEO?
For a long time marketers have been able to rely on the fact that consumers almost exclusively use Google to research buying decisions. So they have been able to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to ensure their brand’s website appears in the organic search results, or use paid search advertising to buy ads on relevant search results.
This is a highly effective way of targeting the right audience at the right time. But now things are changing.
Changing User Behavior: AI + Conversational Search
Increasingly, consumers are using tools like ChatGPT to research their buying decisions. Data from Meltwater’s 2026 Global Digital Report shows that ChatGPT.com is now the fifth most visited website on the web.
While search engines remain popular, many search queries now produce an AI generated summary that often provide enough information to divert users away from clicking through to websites, because their question has already been answered.
With conventional web search, consumers are performing research manually, trying to find trustworthy sources and sifting through information to reach the answers they seek. But with Generative Engines, the AI is performing the research automatically, using its existing base knowledge alongside supplemental information pulled from more recent online sources. A search engine shows users where to find answers, while a Generative Engine just gives them the answer.
Risks of Ignoring GEO
For marketers, the key takeaway is that few top-of-funnel consumers are visiting your website, because during the awareness phase their information needs are being met by Generative Engines. This makes it more difficult to move them down into the consideration phase.
Those who ignore GEO will lose ground, as growing numbers of consumers turn from search engines to Generative Engines, the size of the audiences that can be reached through conventional search marketing will decrease.
What's the Difference Between GEO and SEO?
GEO has similarities with SEO: they both rely on the production of high quality, well structured content that offers value to the reader. Both disciplines also require that relevant content be published on high authority third party sources, such as the media, and trusted industry websites.
Nonetheless, SEO is more focused on optimizing for specific keywords or search terms, while in GEO the emphasis is on creating content that is contextually relevant to the query, providing accurate and detailed information that will help give the user a useful answer.
Below table summarizes the key differences between them:
| Factor | Traditional SEO | LLM Optimization (GEO) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Goal | Rank webpages in Google search results | Appear in AI-generated answers and summaries |
| Optimization Focus | Keywords, backlinks, technical SEO | Clear entities, structured content, narrative consistency |
| How Users Discover Content | Search queries → SERPs → click-through | Prompts → AI answers → source citations or summaries |
| Content Format Priorities | Long-form content optimized for keywords | Extractable blocks: bullets, tables, FAQs, definitions |
| How Engines Retrieve Data | Web crawling & indexing | Live web search + training data + citation patterns |
| What Engines Prefer to Cite | High-authority sites with strong SEO signals | Authoritative, structured, fact-rich sources |
| Success Indicators | Rankings, impressions, organic traffic | AI citations, inclusion in summaries, answer recall |
| Update Frequency Needed | Moderate (when rankings drop) | High — LLMs prefer fresh, date-stamped information |
| Best Use Cases | Driving organic search traffic | Shaping AI answers, reputation correction, brand visibility |
| Biggest Advantage | Stable long-term traffic | Ability to influence narratives inside AI platforms |
| Biggest Challenge | Requires extensive link-building | Requires constant monitoring & multi-platform visibility |
Watch out for Part 2 of this article in late February, where we will discuss how GEO can be implemented in detail!
This article is originally published by Meltwater:
Meltwater provides social and media intelligence. By examining millions of posts each day from social media platforms, blogs, and news sites, Meltwater helps companies make better, more informed decisions based on insight from the outside. Learn more at meltwater.com.
Generative Engine Optimization FAQ
1. How does GEO help brands appear in AI platforms like ChatGPT?
GEO ensures that AI platforms have clear, accurate, and up-to-date information to pull from when generating answers. Because LLMs rely on both training data and real-time retrieval from trusted websites, optimizing your owned content, earned media, structured data, and community presence increases the likelihood that ChatGPT and other AI engines will surface your brand in relevant responses.
GEO strengthens the narrative signals that LLMs detect, helping them understand what your brand does, where it fits, and why it’s credible—ultimately making your business more discoverable inside AI-generated conversations.
2. What does GEO mean for PR teams?
GEO elevates PR from a brand visibility function to a core input shaping how AI engines describe a business. Because LLMs pull heavily from earned media—trusted news outlets, expert commentary, product reviews, interviews—PR becomes essential to influencing what narratives AI systems pick up. PR teams must focus on consistent messaging, authoritative spokespeople, and high-quality coverage to ensure LLMs cite accurate, up-to-date information.
GEO also gives PR teams a new feedback loop: by monitoring AI visibility, they can identify misinformation, narrative gaps, and emerging risks before they impact reputation.
3. Does GEO improve Google rankings?
GEO does not directly improve traditional Google rankings, but the two disciplines support one another. Strong SEO performance can help your content appear in Google’s AI Overviews, which often pull from high-ranking search results. At the same time, GEO encourages clearer structure, fresher content, and higher authority—factors that can benefit organic search performance.
While GEO is not a replacement for SEO, brands that excel at both are more likely to be surfaced in Google’s blended ecosystem of search results, AI summaries, and contextual answers.
