The broader practice of making a brand visible in generatively produced search results, such as Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode and ChatGPT. GEO covers how language models learn about, describe and recommend a brand, including content structure, entity clarity, and the sources models tend to trust.
The term comes from a 2023 academic paper, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization". In practice GEO sits on top of SEO rather than replacing it: most answer engines retrieve live web pages before they write, and Google states that a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
What you can control is whether the right crawlers can reach your pages, whether those pages state facts in passages that can be quoted, and whether credible sources describe your brand consistently. No markup, file or prompt guarantees a citation.
Example
ChatGPT describes a company's product using an old plan name. The GEO work is to make the plan names, prices and product description identical across the site, the help pages and the company's profiles, then check over the following months whether the answers change.
Related terms
Where seodada covers it
The GEO guide covers crawler access, entity clarity and measurement step by step. AI Visibility tracks citations in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode and mentions in ChatGPT for the queries you choose.