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GEO matters more as people put their questions to an assistant instead of comparing ten links. With SEO you want a place in the list of results; with GEO you want a mention inside the answer, linking to your page. You cannot buy that mention: the ads OpenAI has shown in Europe since August sit next to the answer, not in it, as covered in ChatGPT ads in Europe.
What research says about getting cited
The term was coined in a November 2023 paper by researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute and IIT Delhi, presented at KDD in 2024. They tested nine ways to make a text appear more often as a source in AI answers. Three worked best: adding quotations from credible sources, adding statistics, and including direct quotes. Visibility in answers rose by up to 40 percent. Repeating keywords barely helped.
A second finding comes from an Ahrefs study of 1.4 million prompts: pages ChatGPT retrieves through a search engine get cited 88 percent of the time. If you are not in the search results, you rarely make the answer. Google says its AI Overviews need no separate optimisation. The figure shows the four steps at which a page can drop out. Why fewer clicks need not mean fewer buyers, and what to measure instead, is under zero click search.
Four steps where a page can drop out
Search
the assistant turns the question into search queries
drops out: pages the search engine does not find
Fetch
the crawler reads a handful of pages
drops out: sites blocking the crawler in robots.txt
Read
the model looks for sentences that answer the question
drops out: answers buried under general text
Cite
the answer names its sources with a link
stays: a clear fact with a figure, a source and a date
Simplified. According to an Ahrefs study, pages fetched through the search index are cited in 88 percent of cases.
Three names for nearly the same work
AEO, answer engine optimisation, is the older term, aimed at the direct answer at the top of Google, such as a featured snippet, and at voice assistants. LLMO is about how a language model describes your brand. In practice the work overlaps almost completely.
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | A place in the results | The direct answer on top | A mention inside an AI answer |
| What counts | Relevance, technical health, links | A short, clear answer | Facts with sources, sentences that stand alone |
| What you measure | Rankings and clicks | Featured snippets | Mentions and visitors from assistants |
The difference is mostly form. Assistants like to lift sentences that are true on their own, with a figure and a source, and they prefer sources with a clear author, date and origin, what Google calls E-E-A-T. The full comparison is in SEO vs GEO.
Every language is its own answer
Assistants answer in the language of the question and draw on sources in that language first. A company with a strong English site and thin German pages will be cited in London and missing in Munich. If you sell in several markets, the pages that answer local questions with local facts, in the local language, are what get you named there; that is why we build multilingual websites page by page rather than by translation.
A source layer for AI assistants
For Business Centrum, a payroll bureau in Ghent, we built a layer that assistants read easily alongside the normal pages: a page of key employment-law figures (shown at the top), the same data as a file, and an llms.txt summarising the site for language models. Every figure carries its official source; 3,698 figures were checked against it. The first visitors arriving through Google Gemini showed up in October 2026. What llms.txt does and does not do is explained in how to get found in ChatGPT.
Where to start
- Rank for the questions firstWithout a place in the search results there is nothing to cite.
- Put the answer up frontIn the first sentence, so it can stand on its own.
- Write facts an assistant can liftPrices, deadlines and figures, each with its source and date.
- Let the right crawlers inAllow the search crawlers of OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Google in robots.txt; check it with the AI crawler checker.
- Ask the assistants yourselfWhat do ChatGPT and Gemini say about your company, in each language you sell in, and where do they get it?
Questions about AI search
Does GEO replace SEO?
No. AI assistants take most of their sources from search engines. Without solid SEO there is little to cite.
Should I let AI crawlers in?
For the search features of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, yes, or they cannot cite you. Crawlers that only collect training data can be refused separately.
An assistant describes my company wrongly. What can I do?
Publish the correct facts clearly on your own site and keep them consistent everywhere else. Most errors are hallucinations filling a gap; see AI hallucination.