Table of Contents
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is still a new and fast-moving part of search marketing, and for B2B teams, this creates both opportunity and uncertainty. That’s why we’ve created this three-part series: to help you make sense of the GEO landscape so you can seize the former and dispense with the latter.
In Part One of what we’ve been colloquially referring to as GEOld (trademark pending), we’ll cover the following:
- What GEO is and why it matters to your marketing strategy
- How AI search engines decide what pages to cite (and how that differs from search engines)
- GEO practices that don’t actually work
- What a GEO audit is and why you should run one
If you’re confident you already know the basics and want to jump ahead to the GEO Audit Framework or tracking tools, follow the GEOld trail here 
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GEO 101: What Is Generative Engine Optimisation?
GEO is the ongoing practice of optimising your website and online footprint to maximise visibility in AI search engines such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and others.
The building blocks of GEO practices include:
- Topic research
- Content creation
- Technical optimisation
- Authority building
If all these things sound like off-brand variations of SEO, that’s because GEO and SEO are closely related. Many people looking for a digestible definition of GEO often call it the SEO of AI visibility. This is a great start, but you’ll soon find out why that definition is an oversimplification and slightly misleading.
To give you an example, the goals between these two marketing approaches are fundamentally different: for SEO, the goal is to get your page ranked on page one of Google. For GEO, it’s to get your page cited or mentioned as a source when AI generates an answer.
Before we continue, you should also know:
GEO Goes by Many Names GEO Goes by Many Names
It seems like lexicographers haven’t been returning the world’s calls since AI shoved its way onto the scene, because a few years in, there still doesn’t seem to be any consensus on what to call this thing. Because of that, GEO is also known as:- AI search optimisation, or simply AI search
- Answer engine optimisation (AEO)
- Large language model optimisation (LLMO)
- AI optimisation (note we didn’t say AIO, because that stands for AI Overviews)
GEO Is Still Very Young
Standard GEO practices are not yet fully standardised. Rome wasn’t built in a day. What we’re sharing with you now is as true and as accurate as we can make it at the time of writing. To keep it that way, we’ll be updating this guide as often as possible. So, now that we’re all clear on what GEO is, the most important follow-up question is…Why Should B2B Marketers Care About GEO?
Embracing GEO practices means B2B marketers, such as yourself, can attract higher-quality AI-referral traffic and adapt to the changing landscape of online visibility, aka AI Overviews.
We fully recognise that much of the hype and frenzy surrounding GEO is unfounded, especially if you look at the numbers and realise just how little traffic AI is actually accountable for. Google still sends 190x as much traffic to websites as ChatGPT, and ChatGPT accounts for just 0.21% of total site traffic. Traditional search still dominates in absolute traffic, but AI search is growing fast.
Here are other figures to consider:
- Google AI Overviews reach 2 billion monthly users and appear for 21% of all search queries. They process 276M prompts monthly, nearly 20 times as many as ChatGPT’s 14.5M.
- AI Overviews reduce position #1 CTR by 58%. When an AI summary appears, only 8% of users click a traditional link, down from 15%. Even ranking 10th results in a 19.4% loss of clicks.
- 28% of ChatGPT’s top 1,000 cited pages have zero Google organic visibility. A page can be invisible in traditional search but heavily cited by AI.
- AI-referred traffic converts at 14.2%, vs. Google organic at 2.8%. The average AI search visitor is worth 4 to 5 times as much as a traditional organic visitor.
- AI sessions jumped 527% year-on-year.
- Keyword stuffing actively harms GEO performance by reducing AI visibility by 10% in controlled testing.
So, while we’re definitely not saying that you should pull the plug on your existing SEO efforts, we highly recommend that your marketing team consider adopting GEO practices.
But first, you probably need to know what makes your page worth citing. If you can understand what drives this seemingly sentient decision-making, then you’re well on your way to mastering this intro course.
How Do AI Search Engines Decide Which Pages to Cite?
Rather than ranking pages, AI search engines synthesise answers from multiple sources before selecting which to cite and which to ignore.
The original GEO paper, published by researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech, and IIT Delhi, tested nine ways to make content more visible in AI-generated answers. They ran the experiments across 10,000 queries and checked the results in live Perplexity outputs.
The biggest takeaway was that AI systems respond better to content that includes clear, specific, verifiable information. Techniques like adding quotes, statistics, and source citations performed best.
One especially interesting finding was that “Cite Sources” had the greatest impact on lower-ranking pages, boosting visibility by 115% for pages that typically rank lower in traditional search results.
In other words, GEO may help content that SEO already struggles to surface.
Here are the results, if you’re interested (visibility improvement vs. baseline):
The Nine Factors That Drive AI Citation
Drawing from the academic paper, platform-specific analyses, and large-scale citation studies, these are the factors that determine whether AI cites your content, ranked by impact:
Does Content Length Make a Difference?
Ahrefs analysed 174,000 pages cited in AI Overviews and found near-zero correlation between word count and being cited, a fact that kind of shocked our content writers. The average cited page is 1,282 words. 53.4% of cited pages were under 1,000 words. As the old saying goes, it’s quality over quantity.
Does Misinformation Make a Difference?
To answer that question, Ahrefs ran a controlled experiment in which it created a fake luxury company, seeded three contradictory stories on external sites, and tested whether AI engines would pick them up over the official FAQ.
Here’s what it found:
- Gemini and Perplexity included the fake information 37–39% of the time
- ChatGPT-4 and Claude performed better at under 7%
- One model hallucinated a “Black Friday campaign” that never existed
- Claude never hallucinated but also never surfaced the official website
So yeah, gold star for Claude.
GEO “Tactics” That Don’t Actually Work
There’s a lot of GEO hype floating around the internet. Some of it is overinflated, while some of it just isn’t backed by any substantial evidence. But some of it can actually even cause harm. So the next time you’re tempted to test out these speculative or early-day GEO tactics that you found on LinkedIn, resist them at all costs:
- Stuffing pages with keywords to game AI (not that anyone with basic digital marketing experience is still blowing this horn)
- Relying on llms.txt files as a GEO shortcut
- Assuming homepage tweaks alone will move AI visibility
- Treating DR and backlinks as primary GEO signals
- Applying the same GEO tactics to every AI engine, as each engine has a fundamentally different citation and linking algorithm.
Let’s Compare GEO vs. Traditional SEO
How They’re the Same
How They’re Different
Why GEO Is More Important for AI Than SEO?
As digital marketing approaches, SEO and GEO have largely been treated as twins, but we should start thinking of them as sisters: related but recognisably different.
For example, here’s what sets GEO apart from her older sister:
AI systems need to be able to lift a clear fact, quote, or statistic from your page. If the point is buried inside long, heavily descriptive paragraphs, it’s much less likely to be pulled into an answer, even if the page ranks well in search.
AI systems need to be able to lift a clear fact, quote, or statistic from your page. If the point is buried inside long, heavily descriptive paragraphs, it’s much less likely to be pulled into an answer, even if the page ranks well in search.
AI systems are more likely to cite content that includes concrete details such as statistics, named sources, and expert quotations. Those elements give the model something specific to trust and reuse.
Mentions across platforms like Trustpilot, Reddit, G2, Wikipedia, and industry directories can shape AI visibility even if they come from outside your own website. In other words, your broader online footprint should be taken into account.
Different AI engines favour different kinds of sources and content structures. What works well for Perplexity may not perform the same way in ChatGPT or Claude.
AI search results change over time, and even the same query can return different citations on different runs. This academic paper on measuring AI visibility recommends tracking rolling averages across 4–8 weekly observations.
A GEO Audit Can Help You Discover Where You Stand
Now that you know what affects GEO, the next step is to measure how your brand is actually performing against all those signals.
That’s where a GEO audit comes in.
A GEO audit gives you three things:
- Where you stand today: how visible your brand is across AI search engines and how that compares with competitors.
- What needs work: the gaps in your content, technical setup, authority signals, and overall readiness for AI visibility.
- What to do next: a prioritised action plan showing what to fix first, how much effort it will take, and what impact it should have.
Keep Reading to Perform Your Own GEO Audit
We’ve covered what GEO is, why it matters for B2B marketers, and which signals influence AI visibility. You’re ready for the next step: assessing your own visibility with a GEO audit.
In Part Two, we’ll walk you through the framework you can use to evaluate where your brand stands and what to improve first.
