Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of making your content more likely to be found, used and cited when AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews write an answer. The term comes from Aggarwal and colleagues (2024), who showed in a benchmark study that changes to how content is written can raise its visibility in AI-generated answers by up to 40%, with results that vary by subject. For a B2B industrial company, GEO means becoming the source an AI tool quotes when an engineer or buyer asks about the problem you solve. It rests on good SEO, adds a stronger focus on answering questions directly, putting evidence on the page and earning mentions on other credible sites, and it needs its own measurement.
What is generative engine optimization?
A traditional search engine returns a ranked list of links. A generative engine retrieves pages, reads them and writes a single answer, often with a few citations. Aggarwal et al. (2024) described the problem this creates for website owners: these engines combine information from several sources, and the people who publish that information have little control over when and how it appears.
You will see several names for the same family of work:
- Generative engine optimization (GEO): the research term, focused on visibility inside AI-written answers.
- Answer engine optimization (AEO): the practitioner term, often used for chat assistants and answer boxes.
- AI search optimization and LLM SEO: broader labels for the same goal. Our guide to LLM SEO and how AI search engines choose their sources explains the mechanics behind it.
The labels matter less than the shift underneath them. Buyers increasingly read an answer before they see a list of suppliers.
Why GEO matters for B2B and industrial companies
AI answers now sit on top of a large share of searches, and they change what people click.
- AI Overviews are common, especially for questions. In a 40-day study of 55,393 trending queries in 2026, Google showed an AI Overview for 13.7% of all queries and for 64.7% of queries phrased as questions (Xu, Iqbal & Montgomery, 2026). A separate study of 11,500 representative real-user queries found AI Overviews on 51.5% of them (Grossman et al., 2026). The two studies used different query sets, which explains the gap. Both show the format is now a normal part of search.
- People click less when an AI summary appears. Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025. Users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits to pages with an AI summary, compared with 15% when there was none, and clicked a link inside the summary in just 1% of visits (Chapekis & Lieb, 2025). A study of Wikipedia traffic estimated that AI Overviews cut English search referrals by about 5% (Khosravi & Yoganarasimhan, 2026, preprint).
- People use chatbots differently from search engines. In a survey of 84 people, users described a "browse and verify" approach to search engines and a "delegate and consume" approach to AI chatbots, valuing quick summaries (Lichtenegger, Urman & Hannák, 2026). When a buyer delegates the first round of research, the answer decides which suppliers make the list.
Industrial buying adds a reason to care. In a survey of 196 purchasing managers, those who relied more on digital sources were more willing to adopt innovations, yet they focused more on vendors with strong brands and on peer opinions (Krijestorac, Garg & Konana, 2021). AI answers tend to repeat what the wider web says about a category, so a supplier that few credible sources mention can drop out before a human ever compares options.
We see early signs of this on our own site. Since our first wave of articles went live, Search Console has started to show long, conversational queries that read like prompts typed into an AI assistant, along with exact citations of journal articles we reference. It is a small sample, but it suggests AI tools are already finding and drawing on well-sourced industrial content.
How GEO differs from SEO
SEO and GEO share a foundation. Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode: a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet (Google Search Central, 2025). If your site is hard to crawl or thin on content, fix that first. Our guide to SEO for manufacturers covers the basics.
The differences start after that:
- The sources are different. Grossman et al. (2026) compared Google Search, AI Overviews and Gemini on the same queries and found the sources each retrieved were very different (an average overlap of under 0.2 on a 0 to 1 scale). Xu et al. (2026) found that nearly 30% of the domains cited in AI Overviews did not appear anywhere on the first page of results. Ranking well helps, but it does not guarantee a citation.
- The goal is different. SEO was built around a ranked list, where clicks are informative but shaped by how results are presented (Joachims et al., 2007), and where page features such as featured snippets already change where clicks go (Gleason et al., 2023). In GEO, the goal is to be one of the few sources used and named in the answer.
- Third-party mentions carry more weight. A large comparison of AI search and Google found that AI search leaned heavily toward earned media, meaning independent, authoritative third-party sources, over brand-owned and social content (Chen et al., 2025, preprint). What others say about you counts for more than what you say about yourself.
What the research says improves AI visibility
GEO research is young and moving fast, and much of it is still in preprint. The findings so far point in a consistent direction:
- Cite sources and add numbers. In the original GEO benchmark, adding citations, quotations from relevant sources and statistics produced the largest gains, while keyword stuffing, an old SEO habit, performed poorly (Aggarwal et al., 2024).
- Match the questions buyers ask. In a study of 158,099 AI answers to commercial questions, pages whose titles and paragraphs matched the questions people ask were cited more often. FAQ blocks, structured data, summary boxes and page speed helped only when comparing different websites, not pages within the same site. The findings held in a market of small B2B vendors (Chen & Koudas, 2026, preprint).
- Give the engine evidence it can lift. Across ChatGPT, Google and Perplexity, the pages that influenced answers most tended to be longer, more structured, closely matched to the question and rich in definitions, numbers, comparisons and step-by-step instructions (Zhang, He & Yao, 2026, preprint).
- Structure helps. Restructuring content at the level of the document, its sections and its emphasis raised citation rates across six generative engines in one experiment (Yu et al., 2026, preprint).
- Domain matters. The same tactic can work in one subject and fail in another (Aggarwal et al., 2024). Test in your own category before rolling anything out.
A GEO plan for an industrial company
- Decide which AI crawlers can reach you. OpenAI says sites that block its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and that this is separate from GPTBot, which collects training data (OpenAI, n.d.). For Google, websites that blocked Google's AI crawler were significantly less likely to be retrieved by AI Overviews (Grossman et al., 2026). Check your robots.txt and your firewall rules, and make the choice on purpose.
- Write one page per real buyer question. Use the question as the heading, answer it in the first paragraph, then give the detail. Start with the questions your sales engineers answer every week.
- Put the proof in text. Specifications, tolerances, test methods, standards met, application limits and comparisons belong on the page as text, not only inside PDFs and images.
- Earn mentions on credible third-party sites. Trade publications, industry associations, standards bodies, distributor pages, conference programs and customer case studies all count. Thought leadership and trade shows are two of the most practical ways to earn them.
- Keep your name and claims consistent. The same company name, product names and core claims should appear on your site, your LinkedIn page, directories and partner sites. A clear B2B brand is easier for both people and models to remember.
- Check what the AI tools say about you. Generative engines make mistakes. An audit of four generative search engines found that only 51.5% of generated sentences were fully supported by their citations, and only 74.5% of citations supported the sentence they were attached to (Liu, Zhang & Liang, 2023). Find errors about your company early and correct the source pages they come from.
How to measure GEO
AI visibility is harder to measure than rankings. A practical setup has three parts:
- Search Console. Google includes traffic from AI features in the Performance report under the Web search type (Google Search Central, 2025). Watch impressions on question-style queries.
- Referrals from AI tools. Track visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot in your analytics. Compare against pages you have not changed: a field study found that ChatGPT referrals to untreated pages on one site grew 3.5 times over the same period simply because the platform was growing (Watanabe & Nakayashiki, 2026, preprint). Raw growth can flatter your results.
- A fixed prompt set. Write 20 to 30 questions your buyers ask, run them in the main AI tools each month and record whether you are cited and whether your content shaped the answer. Researchers separate these two outcomes, citation and actual use in the answer, because they don't always move together (Zhang et al., 2026, preprint).
Frequently asked questions
Is GEO replacing SEO?
No. Google's AI features draw on its search index, and a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet to appear in them (Google Search Central, 2025). GEO builds on SEO and adds goals and measures of its own.
Is answer engine optimization the same as GEO?
For practical purposes, yes. Both aim to get your content used in AI-written answers. GEO is the term used in research; AEO is more common among marketers.
Do we need schema markup for AI search?
Google says no special schema.org markup is needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and any structured data you use should match the visible text on the page (Google Search Central, 2025). Structured data can still help in other ways, but it won't fix weak content.
How long does GEO take to work?
There is no reliable benchmark yet. AI answers also change between runs of the same question (Grossman et al., 2026), so judge progress over months of measurement, not a single check.
Should an industrial company block AI crawlers?
It is a business decision. Blocking search crawlers reduces your chance of being cited, while blocking training crawlers is a separate choice. Decide which crawlers serve your goals and set them deliberately.
The bottom line
Pick the ten questions your best customers asked before they bought, and make sure your website answers each one clearly, with evidence, on its own page. AXXEN builds search and AI visibility programs for industrial and technology companies as part of our AI & Growth Automation work.
About the author
Mo Farrokhi, PhD, is the founder of AXXEN in Calgary, Alberta. His path runs from electrical engineering through an MBA and a PhD in marketing to industry roles, including VP Marketing & Product at a TSX-listed clean-tech company. AXXEN builds marketing systems for technology, manufacturing and industrial companies that have outgrown ad-hoc marketing.
Sources
- Aggarwal, P., Murahari, V., Rajpurohit, T., Kalyan, A., Narasimhan, K., & Deshpande, A. (2024). GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3637528.3671900
- Chapekis, A., & Lieb, A. (2025, July 22). Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org
- Chen, M.-H., & Koudas, N. (2026). What drives AI citations? Content, retrieval and model knowledge in generative engine optimization (GEO) (arXiv:2610.15033) [Preprint]. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.15033
- Chen, M.-H., Wang, X.-X., Chen, K.-W., & Koudas, N. (2025). Generative engine optimization: How to dominate AI search (arXiv:2509.08919) [Preprint]. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.08919
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