Encyclopedia / SEO & GEO

GEO (generative engine optimization)

Being found, understood and cited by AI assistants.

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews answer questions directly and cite their sources. They reward the same foundations as SEO: crawlable server-rendered HTML, clear headings, plain factual statements, structured data, the same facts across all your profiles, and references from other sites. You can't fix a weak website with GEO. Good GEO starts with the website.

Related terms

Structured data (JSON-LD) robots.txt Rendering: SSG, SSR, CSR llms.txt

Where it shows up in a page load

  1. Step 11: Meanwhile: the crawlers. Googlebot and AI crawlers make the same trip. They read robots.txt and the sitemap, fetch each page and read the head (title, description, canonical, structured data) and the content. That is everything search results and AI answers have to work with, so SEO and GEO start with the website itself.

Watch the full request journey →

More in SEO & GEO

How search engines and AI systems find, read and describe the site.

Title tag Meta description Canonical URL Robots meta / noindex robots.txt Sitemap Open Graph & social cards Structured data (JSON-LD) Core Web Vitals Internal links Backlinks Search Console llms.txt

Open in the interactive encyclopedia →