Can a business control what an AI system says about it?

Not directly, because every AI system writes its own answers. A business can, however, influence the information those systems draw on: a clear website, consistent facts, and a strong presence on relevant platforms.

Why do some GEO measures take effect faster than others?

GEO measures take effect at different speeds because AI systems draw on two sources of knowledge. Content that a system retrieves from the web when a question is asked can have an effect quickly, while knowledge from a language model’s training data only changes with a new model version.

What is the first step in GEO?

The first step in GEO is a baseline: how AI systems describe the offering today, for which questions it appears, and where it is missing. Only on that basis can measures be prioritized sensibly.

What is GEO? Generative Engine Optimization

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) describes how brands and businesses make sure that generative AI systems know them, understand them correctly, and mention them in their answers. These systems, known as generative engines, respond to questions with text they write themselves. To do so, they combine a language model’s parametric knowledge—what it learned during training—with content they often retrieve from the web at the moment a question is asked. Whoever appears in that answer gets noticed.

The term was coined in a research paper titled “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization,” published in November 2023. It covers the entire discipline: from analyzing how AI systems portray an offering to the actions that improve that portrayal.

The three areas of work

How an AI system describes an offering depends on what information it can find and how unambiguous that information is. This leads to three areas of work:

Monitoring: regularly checking whether and how AI systems mention your offering, and tracking how it compares with competitors over time (GEO monitoring). The result describes your AI visibility.
On-page: making your own website easy for AI systems to read and understand (On-Page GEO), for example with clearly structured copy, structured data, and an llms.txt file.
Off-page: strengthening your presence beyond your own website (Off-Page GEO). Industry portals, directories, reviews, and discussions on relevant platforms can all shape the picture an AI system forms of an offering.

What success looks like

In GEO, what counts is how an offering shows up in AI answers: Is it named at all? Are the facts right? In what context and with what tone does it appear? And does the answer give your own website as a source? Such source references are called AI citations; when an answer names a brand without a source, that is a mention.

Because AI answers vary by system, by how a question is phrased, and over time (answer variability), GEO is not a one-off project. Only recurring measurement across many typical questions, for example of the mention rate, gives a reliable picture. Such measurement shows which actions should come first.

GEOLYX covers all three areas as GEO Monitoring, On-Page GEO, and Off-Page GEO, and turns the analysis into concrete, prioritized recommendations.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

Definition

The three areas of work

What success looks like

Frequently asked questions