Generative engine optimization: how to get your business into AI answers

What generative engine optimization is

Search engine optimization (SEO) is about ranking in a list of results. Generative engine optimization is about being used inside an answer. When someone asks an AI assistant “what is the best way to handle X for a company like mine”, the reply usually names a few businesses or products and links to the pages it relied on. If yours is among them, you are on the shortlist before the buyer has visited a website.

You will also see it called answer engine optimization (AEO), AI SEO or LLM optimization. The labels differ; the question is the same: when buyers ask about your market, does the answer include you?

What the research found

The term comes from a 2023 paper by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues, published at the KDD 2024 conference (Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”). The authors built a benchmark of queries across many domains and tested how changes to a source page affected how visible it was in generated answers.

• Adding quotations, statistics and citations to sources were among the best-performing changes, along with making the text more fluent.
• Keyword stuffing did not help; in their results it performed below making no change at all.
• The best methods improved visibility by up to about 40% on their measures, and what worked varied by subject area.

Two cautions. The experiments used their own test engine and benchmark, so the exact numbers will not transfer to every assistant. And the lesson is not “add any statistic”: an unsourced number is exactly the kind of claim careful readers, and careful systems, discount.

What Google says about its AI features

Google’s guidance for AI Overviews and AI Mode (AI features and your website) is short and worth reading in full. The main points:

• There are no additional requirements and no special optimizations needed to appear; normal SEO best practice applies.
• To be shown as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet.
• You do not need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files or special structured data for these features.
• Pages that appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in the Search Console Performance report, under the Web search type.

So for Google, GEO is mostly good SEO done properly. Other assistants work differently, but they share the same basic need: pages they can reach, that answer the question clearly, from a source they can trust.

How AI answers choose sources

Assistants that search the web generally run one or more searches for the question, read some of the results, and write an answer from them, citing some of what they read. That has practical consequences:

• If you do not rank or get retrieved, you cannot be cited. Classic search visibility still feeds AI visibility.
• Specific beats general. A page that directly answers the exact question is easier to use than a homepage that mentions it in passing.
• Sources that agree get repeated. If several independent pages describe your business the same way, an assistant is more likely to name you.
• Answers vary between runs. The same question can produce different answers, so one check is a sample, not a verdict.

Practical steps for a small business

How to measure it

There is no single “AI ranking”, so measure it the way a buyer experiences it: ask the question and read the answer. For each question, record whether your brand is mentioned, whether a page of yours is cited as a source, and which competitors appear. Repeat weekly and judge the trend, not a single run.

Conterity’s AI search visibility checks do exactly this: up to ten buyer questions per site, asked weekly with Claude using web search (plus OpenAI, Perplexity and Gemini when they are enabled), with every answer and its sources recorded. For Google’s AI features, use the Search Console Performance report.

What not to do

• Do not keyword-stuff. The research found it did not help, and it makes pages worse for people.
• Do not invent statistics or reviews. Fabricated claims are a liability with readers, with search engines and with any system that checks sources.
• Do not expect a special file to do the work. Google says AI text files are not needed for its features. Clear, crawlable pages matter more.
• Do not judge it on one answer. Answers change between runs and models; look at several weeks.

Frequently asked questions