Glossary
What is generative engine optimization?
Generative engine optimization is the practice of getting a product or business named in the answer an AI engine gives, rather than ranked in a list of links. The goal is not a position. It is being one of the three or four names that come back.
How is it different from SEO?
SEO competes for a position on a page of links, where the user then chooses. GEO competes for inclusion in a synthesised answer, where the engine has already chosen. That difference changes what you can measure and what you can influence.
In SEO you have a rank: a stable integer you can track daily. In GEO you have presence or absence, and it is not stable. Asking Perplexity the same question twice about ten WordPress plugin categories produced a mean overlap of only 74% between runs — roughly a quarter of the named products changed. Rank tracking has no equivalent problem.
The second difference is where the answer comes from. Search sends traffic to the page that ranks. AI answers are assembled from sources the engine retrieved, and those sources are frequently not the vendor’s own site. In the ten categories measured, cited sources were overwhelmingly third-party listicles — many of them published by competing vendors.
What actually influences it?
On current evidence, in rough order: being retrievable at all (valid certificate, server-rendered HTML, retrieval crawlers not blocked), having original data nobody else has, being mentioned on third-party pages the engines pull from, freshness, and answer-shaped page structure.
Several widely recommended tactics have no supporting evidence. Ahrefs found 97% of published llms.txt files across 137,000 sites had never been fetched. The one controlled test of schema markup found no measurable citation lift. Backlinks correlate with AI visibility at 0.19, against 0.66 for brand mentions.
Is it worth doing yet?
It depends on whether your buyers ask engines before they buy. For considered purchases with a discovery phase — software, professional services, high-ticket local services — they increasingly do, and that buyer arrives having already been given a shortlist. Volume is still far below classic search. Intent is terminal.
Part of the GEO glossary. The measurements referenced here come from the Plugin Visibility Index, which publishes its raw counts and its limits.