Definition
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the wider practice of making your content discoverable AND citable by generative AI. It encompasses AEO (the citation itself), retrieval-system fitness (whether the engine's RAG pipeline picks your content), and authority signals (whether the engine treats you as trustworthy). The term was coined by Aggarwal et al. in the GEO paper (KDD 2024).
A B2B SaaS company practicing GEO ensures their pages are: indexed by Perplexity's retrieval system, cited by ChatGPT when asked about their category, and recognized as a knowledge-graph entity in Wikidata.
How to optimize
Combine AEO tactics with broader retrieval hygiene: allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt, publish an llms.txt, mark up structured data, build entity recognition via Wikidata, and ensure freshness via updated-date markup.