What is generative engine optimization (GEO)? LLM SEO explained

You will meet the same idea under other names: answer engine optimization (AEO), LLM SEO, AI search optimization. The labels are marketing; the method underneath them is one thing, and most of it is not new.

How AI answers get assembled

Understanding the mechanism removes most of the mystique. Google describes AI Overviews and AI Mode as using a "query fan-out" technique: instead of answering the typed query alone, the system issues multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources, then composes a response from what comes back — surfacing supporting links to the pages it drew on. Because it fans out, it can show a wider and more diverse set of links than a single ranked list would.

Two consequences follow immediately. First, you are not competing for one query any more; you are competing for the subtopics the system decides to search on your behalf. Second, a page that answers one narrow question completely can be cited in an answer to a broader question it never targeted.

What the requirements actually are

This is where most GEO marketing overstates. Google's own documentation on AI features says it directly: the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features, there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimizations are necessary. To be eligible as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, fulfilling the ordinary technical requirements — and nothing beyond them.

The technical requirements themselves are the Search Essentials: Googlebot must not be blocked, the page must return a working response, and the content must be indexable. There are very few of them, and most sites pass without noticing. Whether a page gets that far at all is a question of crawling and indexing.

So the honest version of GEO is: there is no secret markup that buys a citation. What there is, is a set of properties that make a page easy to quote correctly — and those are worth building deliberately.

What actually helps

Answer the question in one liftable passage. A model composing an answer needs a self-contained statement it can attribute. A definition that opens with the term, states the thing in two or three sentences, and does not depend on the paragraph above it is quotable; a definition that starts with "As we saw earlier…" is not. Every page in this hub is written that way on purpose.

Cover the subtopics, not just the head term. Query fan-out rewards pages that answer the neighbouring questions too — the FAQ at the bottom of a page is doing real work here, not decoration.

Be an entity the machine can verify. Consistent naming across your site and off it, real authors, an organisation that resolves to the same identity everywhere, and structured data that states the facts rather than implying them.

Have something only you can say. Google's helpful-content guidance asks whether a page provides original information, reporting, research, or analysis — the same question decides whether an answer engine has any reason to cite you rather than the encyclopaedia. A page that restates the consensus adds nothing to a synthesised answer. That is a writing problem before it is a technical one, which is why SEO copywriting and GEO are hard to separate.

Match the intent of the question, not the shape of a keyword. Answer engines are asked questions in full sentences. Understanding the search intent behind them is the same skill it always was, applied to longer queries.

What you can switch off

The controls are the ones you already have. Google states that because AI is built into Search, robots.txt directives for Googlebot are how site owners manage crawling for Search, and that to limit what is shown from your pages you use nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, or noindex. Limiting AI training and grounding in Google's other systems is a separate control, Google-Extended.

The trade-off is blunt and worth stating to any client who asks: nosnippet keeps your text out of AI answers and out of ordinary search snippets at the same time. There is no setting that says "show me in the ten blue links but not in the summary above them".

What GEO is not

It is not a replacement for SEO, and it is not a product you can buy instead of one. Everything that makes a page eligible for citation — being crawlable, being indexed, being snippet-eligible, being genuinely useful — is the same list that makes it eligible to rank. Anyone selling GEO as a parallel discipline with its own secret levers is selling the label.

It is also not guaranteed. Google is explicit that meeting every requirement and best practice does not mean it will crawl, index, or serve a page. Citation is an outcome you make likely, not one you buy.

How Xerx does this

We treat AI visibility as measurable work, not as a mood. Before changing anything we take a baseline: how often AI answers mention you versus your competitors, per platform, with a date on it. For most businesses the honest starting number is zero — which is fine, and makes the progress afterwards visible. The service is described under AI search optimization.

Then we build the boring layer: structured data that states who you are and what you sell, entity consistency across the site and the profiles that point at it, clean heading structure, stable anchors, and definition blocks that can be lifted without mangling your meaning. This page is an example of the format we ship — a DefinedTerm with its own citation anchor, an Article with a review date, and an FAQPage built from the questions below.

And we re-measure. The baseline gets re-run at intervals and reported in plain language: what got cited, where, and against whom. This work sits inside SEO Care from €790 per month and the Growth tier at €1,490 per month, both cancel monthly. We do not sell a guaranteed citation, because nobody can.

FAQ