Definition
The same work under the name that emphasises the generated answer rather than the engine. See AEO.
In the report
The same work as AEO under the name that emphasises the generated answer. The report uses neither term in its body; it says 'get named' and 'get cited'.
Worked example
A generative engine writes its answer from pages it fetched seconds ago. In a run for a stainless steel fabricator, the most-cited source across 46 answers was Thomasnet, a supplier directory, in 10 of them; the company's own site was cited in 17, but on the food-processing questions the engines named Dorner and Paul Mueller, whose pages state the application in the first paragraph. Generative engine optimisation is making the page the engine fetches say the thing the question asks, and being on the directory it reads when it does not.
How to move it
See AEO. The checklist has the thirteen site items and the seven off-site ones.
Where it shows up
What is GEO (generative engine optimisation)? The same work as AEO under a name that emphasises the generated answer rather than the engine: being named and cited when ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or AI Overviews write an answer to a buyer's question. In practice the terms are interchangeable, and the checklist is the same.
What is AEO (answer engine optimisation)? The work of being named and cited in the answers of engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. It has two halves: making your own site readable and quotable (crawler access, structured data, plain statements of price and scope), and being present on the third-party pages the engines read before they answer.
See GEO measured on your site
Your website, region and work email. The score appears in about three minutes, and the report is a link you keep.