GEO is often used interchangeably with AEO, but it emphasises the full generative stack — training data, retrieval-augmented generation, and grounding — not only the citation choice at answer time.
What GEO covers beyond AEO
- Entity clarity so LLMs correctly identify your brand across contexts.
- Presence in structured public sources that models retrieve at inference (Wikidata, Wikipedia, GitHub).
- llms.txt and MCP publishing.
- Consistency of factual claims across web and social surfaces.
Example
A B2B tool ranks its target keyword on Google but is not mentioned by ChatGPT for the same query. Auditing its GEO footprint reveals a missing Wikipedia article and inconsistent product descriptions across the web. Fixing both surfaces the brand in generative answers within a quarter.
How SEM Optimiser reports it
The GEO audit checks entity presence across public sources, llms.txt validity, and generative-mention frequency across the four major answer engines.
Related terms
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)
Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring content so it is selected and cited by answer-first engines including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews.
- AI Overview
An AI Overview is a generative summary shown at the top of a Google search results page, synthesised by Google's Gemini model from multiple ranking sources.
- llms.txt
llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a domain that lists the site's key content and signals to LLM-based crawlers how the content should be discovered and used.
- Entity SEO
Entity SEO is the practice of optimising a brand or website's presence in search engines' entity graphs so it is correctly identified and disambiguated across queries.