Short Answer

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) means making a website’s content easy for AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews to find, understand and quote. When someone asks these tools a question, they write a short answer and often name a few brands or websites in it. GEO is the work marketers do to get their brand named in that answer. The idea comes from a 2023 study by researchers at Princeton University and IIT Delhi. It found that the right changes to a web page can make it show up in AI answers up to 40% more often.

First, what is SEO?

To understand GEO, you need a quick idea of SEO.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the work of getting a website to show up high on Google when people search for something. If you search “digital marketing course in Delhi”, the websites you see at the top got there partly because of SEO.

For about 20 years, the goal for companies was simple: rank on page one of Google, and people will click through to the website.

AI tools have changed that. Now many people skip the list of websites and just read the answer the AI writes for them. That’s where GEO comes in.

What does GEO mean in SEO?

In digital marketing today, GEO means Generative Engine Optimization.

The word “generative” comes from generative AI, which is AI that generates (writes) new text. ChatGPT is a generative AI tool. So a “generative engine” is simply a search tool that writes you an answer instead of only showing you a list of links.

If you search for “GEO SEO” on Google, you may also find older articles about geo-targeting, which means showing up in searches from a particular city or area. That’s a different topic. When people talk about GEO today, they almost always mean AI search.

GEO doesn’t replace SEO. It sits on top of it. AI tools still look for information on websites that search engines already know about. OpenAI says ChatGPT search uses third-party search providers to find web pages. Google says the same SEO best practices apply to its AI Overviews and AI Mode. So a website that doesn’t do well in search usually struggles in AI answers too.

We’ve explained how SEO, GEO and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) compare in our guide to SEO vs AEO vs GEO.

Why is everyone talking about GEO now?

Because a lot of people now get their answers from AI instead of clicking on websites. Here are the numbers:

• ChatGPT had more than 900 million users every week as of February 2026, according to OpenAI.
• India alone has 100 million weekly ChatGPT users, which makes it ChatGPT’s second-biggest country after the US. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman shared this in February 2026. He also said a bigger share of ChatGPT users in India are students than in any other country.
• Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said in May 2026 that AI Overviews (the AI summary you see at the top of many Google searches) reach more than 2.5 billion people a month.
• Ahrefs, an SEO software company, studied 300,000 searches in February 2026. It found that when Google shows an AI Overview, the website ranked first gets 58% fewer clicks.

Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs, put it simply: “For every 100 clicks you could historically earn for a top-ranking page, Google now ‘keeps’ 58.”

Here’s what that looks like in real life. A final-year student in Pune asks ChatGPT, “Which digital marketing course in India has the best placements?” ChatGPT replies with a short answer that names three or four institutes. If a college isn’t named in that answer, the student may never hear of it. She doesn’t need to open Google at all.

So ranking on Google is no longer enough. Brands also need to be the ones the AI talks about.

How does an AI tool decide which websites to mention?

Think of the AI as a student writing an assignment in a hurry. It doesn’t read the whole internet. It searches quickly, opens a few pages, copies the most useful lines and writes its answer. Most AI search tools work in four steps:

1. It breaks your question into smaller searches. “Best digital marketing course with placements” might become “digital marketing course placement rate India”, “digital marketing course fees 2026” and “digital marketing course reviews”.
2. It searches the web and collects a shortlist of pages. Usually these come from Bing or Google results.
3. It picks the most useful lines from those pages. The AI looks for short pieces of text that answer the question clearly and sound trustworthy.
4. It writes the answer. It combines those lines into one reply and often adds links to the websites it used. These links are called citations.

So a website has to clear two tests:

Most GEO advice online only talks about Test 2. But many brands fail at Test 1.

Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands in 2025 to see which brands Google’s AI Overviews mention most. The biggest factor was how often a brand is mentioned on other websites, such as news articles, blogs, forums and review sites. Backlinks (links from other websites to a brand’s website), which matter a lot in normal SEO, mattered much less. In Ahrefs’ data, brand mentions were about three times as strongly linked to showing up in AI Overviews as backlinks were.

What is the difference between GEO and SEO?

Some things stay the same for both: the website should load fast, be easy for search engines to read, and be trusted by people.

Google itself says, “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary” (Google Search Central). So for Google’s own AI features, good SEO is the base. GEO adds the extra writing and brand-building work that helps across all AI tools, including ChatGPT and Perplexity.

How do marketers do GEO? 9 simple steps

If you join the SEO or content team of a company, this is the kind of GEO work you’d do. You don’t need to be a coder for most of it. The first five steps are about how you write. The last four are about the company’s website and brand, and you’d usually do them with the website team.

You can practise the writing steps right now, on a college assignment, a LinkedIn post or your own blog.

1. Give the answer first

Put a clear, one- or two-line answer right at the start of each section. Then explain. If the question is “What is GEO?”, the first sentence should start with “GEO is…”. Don’t make the reader (or the AI) scroll through background first. A good rule is to answer within the first 75 words.

2. Add numbers, quotes and sources

This is the most tested part of GEO. The Princeton and IIT Delhi researchers changed web pages in different ways and checked how often AI tools then used them. Here’s what they found:

The last row matters. Old SEO tricks like repeating a keyword many times make things worse in AI search.

3. Write headings as real questions

People type full questions into ChatGPT, like “How much does a digital marketing course cost in India?” Use the same kind of questions as headings instead of short labels like “Fees”. Then the text under each heading is a ready-made answer.

4. Make every paragraph make sense on its own

The AI often picks a single paragraph, not the whole page. A line like “As mentioned above, it costs ₹2 lakh” makes no sense on its own because the reader can’t see what “it” is. Write “The course costs ₹2 lakh” instead. Keep paragraphs short, about two to four lines.

5. Use tables and lists

Fees, salaries, comparisons and steps are easier for an AI to read in a table or a numbered list than in a long paragraph. Type tables out as text. An AI usually can’t read a table that’s inside an image.

6. Let AI tools visit the website

Every AI tool sends a small program, called a crawler or bot, to read websites. Every website has a file called robots.txt that tells these bots whether they’re allowed in. If it blocks them, that AI tool can never quote the website. Marketers check this file and ask the website team to allow these bots:

• ChatGPT: OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User
• Perplexity: PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User
• Claude: Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User
• Google AI Overviews and AI Mode: the normal Googlebot

Also, the important text should be directly on the page. Some bots can’t see text hidden behind “click to read more” buttons or tabs.

7. Add structured data

Structured data (also called schema) is a small piece of code that tells search engines and AI tools what a page is about. For example, it can say “this page is an article”, “this page is a course” or “this section is a list of FAQs”. The website team usually adds it, and the marketer decides what it should say. Make sure what the code says matches what’s actually written on the page.

8. Get the brand mentioned on other websites

This step helps a brand pass Test 1, and most companies skip it. Marketers try to get the brand mentioned in “best of” lists on other websites, in Reddit and Quora discussions, in YouTube videos and on review sites. The brand name should be the same everywhere, so AI tools know it’s the same company. A March 2026 study by Peec AI, which looked at 30 million sources, found Reddit was the most-cited website in AI answers.

9. Keep the content updated

Old numbers make a page less useful to readers and harder to trust. Good pages show a “last updated” date, and marketers refresh old numbers at least once or twice a year.

How do companies know if GEO is working?

Google Search Console, the free tool most SEO teams use, can’t fully show this. Teams usually track four things:

1. Mentions: how often AI answers name the brand.
2. Citations: how often AI answers link to the brand’s website.
3. Share of voice: how often the brand is mentioned compared with its competitors. If AI tools mention brands 100 times for a topic and 20 of those are your company, its share of voice is 20%.
4. AI traffic: how many people visit the website from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai or gemini.google.com. You can see this in Google Analytics (GA4).

The simplest method is free. The team writes down 50 to 100 questions their customers might ask. Every month, they ask these in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google, and note which brands get named. AI answers change often, so they look at the trend over a few months.

This is what we do at Kraftshala. Every week, we use Ahrefs Brand Radar to check how ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode answer questions like “best digital marketing courses” and “digital marketing course with placement”. One thing we see often: the same question gets a different list of institutes from different AI tools in the same week. That’s why GEO teams track several AI tools, not just ChatGPT.

You can try a small version of this today. Pick a category you know, like phones, food delivery apps or online courses. Ask ChatGPT and Gemini five questions about it, such as “Which is the best budget phone in India?”, and write down which brands each tool names. That’s GEO tracking, and it’s a good small project to talk about in an interview.

Which tools are used for GEO?

• Ahrefs Brand Radar: shows how often AI tools mention a brand and its competitors.
• Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: shows how AI tools talk about a brand.
• Google Search Console and Google Analytics (GA4): free Google tools that show a website’s search performance and visits from AI tools.
• Google’s Rich Results Test: a free tool that checks if a page’s structured data is set up correctly.
• A simple spreadsheet: to track the monthly list of questions by hand. It’s slow, but it shows exactly what the AI says about a brand.

Ahrefs and Semrush are paid tools that companies buy for their teams. The free Google tools and a spreadsheet are enough to start learning.

What skills do you need to learn GEO?

If you’re a fresher or moving into marketing from another field, you don’t need to learn GEO separately from everything else. It builds on skills you’d learn anyway:

• SEO basics: how search engines find and rank pages.
• Content writing: writing clear answers people (and AI tools) can quote.
• Research: finding real numbers and sources to back up what you write.
• Analytics: using tools like Google Analytics and Search Console to measure results.

The new part is learning how AI tools pick their answers and how to track a brand in them.

Learn GEO and get a high-paying marketing job with Kraftshala’s Marketing Launchpad

If you want to learn GEO and SEO properly and turn them into a job, Kraftshala School of Business’s Marketing Launchpad is a digital marketing course with placement built for exactly that. You don’t need a marketing background or any particular degree to join. 84% of the students placed from the program had no relevant work experience when they started.

What will you learn?

SEO and LLM search optimisation is a full module in the program. It covers AEO and GEO for ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. You learn it with the same tools SEO teams use at work, including Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog, WordPress, Google Analytics (GA4), Google Tag Manager, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.

The program also teaches the rest of digital marketing, so you aren’t limited to one kind of job:

• Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram) and Google Ads
• E-commerce and quick commerce ads (Amazon, Flipkart, Shopify, Blinkit)
• Programmatic advertising (DV360, CM360, The Trade Desk)
• Content and social media (blogs, Reels, Shorts)
• Google Analytics, dashboards and Excel
• Vibe coding: using AI to build real landing pages and marketing tools without traditional coding
• CV writing, interviews and communication

You also complete 9+ live projects where you run campaigns with real ad budgets on Meta, Google and Amazon. That gives you real work to show recruiters, not just a certificate.

What jobs and salaries do students get?

• Kraftshala placed 1,037 Marketing Launchpad students in the last 14 months, at a 94% placement rate. In total, 3,300+ students have been placed with 800+ recruiters.
• Freshers have received offers of up to ₹10.4 LPA, and experienced candidates up to ₹16 LPA. The average CTC is ₹5.5 LPA.
• About 1 in 3 graduates joins one of the Big Five global agency groups (Publicis, WPP Media, dentsu, Omnicom, IPG Mediabrands, Havas).
• Students get placed in roles like performance marketing, digital marketing, e-commerce, SEO, growth marketing and social media.

Kraftshala publishes a placement report for every batch since the program started. You can read them in the batch-wise placement reports.

Fees, format and refund

Apply for Kraftshala’s Marketing Launchpad

Wrapping up

GEO is about getting a brand mentioned in the answers that AI tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews write. To do that, a website has to pass two tests: the AI has to find it, and then the AI has to pick lines from it. Clear answers, real numbers, expert quotes, question-style headings and being mentioned on other websites help with both. Repeating keywords doesn’t.

GEO is still a new skill. If you learn it along with the SEO, content and analytics skills it’s built on, you’ll be able to tell a recruiter how their brand shows up in ChatGPT and what to do about it. Kraftshala’s Marketing Launchpad, covered above, is one structured way to learn these skills with live projects and placement support.