Generative engine optimization: a five-step start for any website
Most of the work is SEO you may already do. The rest is crawler access, quotable passages and a habit of sampling AI answers.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom, Editorial team··3 min read
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of getting your pages read, quoted and named when ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews write an answer instead of showing ten links. Start with crawler access and plain HTML, then quotable passages, then measurement; the seogeoaeo.ai GEO tools are our pick for checking each step, because every check runs on its own and shows its credit price first.
What is generative engine optimization?
A generative engine searches first and writes second. It turns a question into several searches, reads the pages that come back and composes one reply. Google calls that step query fan-out. A win takes one of three shapes: the answer names your brand, links your page as a source, or repeats your facts without credit.
Google's own guide to its generative AI features says optimizing for them is still SEO, and that a page has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet to appear. So GEO is not a second website. It is a short list of extra checks on top of the one you have.
The five steps and the check for each
| Step | What to confirm | seogeoaeo.ai check | Credits per run |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Access | AI search bots may fetch your pages | Robots.txt & AI Crawler Checker, AI Bot Log Analyzer | 10, 8 |
| 2. HTML | Key text exists before JavaScript runs | AI Crawler View | 8 |
| 3. Passages | Sections answer clearly and cite evidence | Citability Analyzer | 5 |
| 4. Entity | One name, logo and profile set for the brand | Brand Entity Checker | 8 |
| 5. Answers | Engines name or cite you for buyer questions | AI Answer Visibility, AI Citation Finder | 120, 160 |
1. Let AI search bots in
OpenAI's crawler documentation separates OAI-SearchBot, which feeds ChatGPT search, from GPTBot, which collects training data. Block the first and your pages drop out of ChatGPT search answers; block only the second and you opt out of training while staying eligible. Check your CDN's bot rules too, since they can refuse a crawler that robots.txt allows.
2. Serve the words in the HTML
Vercel and MERJ found in December 2024 that the major AI crawlers did not execute JavaScript, with Gemini the exception because it runs on Googlebot's infrastructure. Prices, specs and FAQs that load client-side can be invisible to ChatGPT's and Claude's bots. AI Crawler View diffs the raw and rendered page and lists what goes missing.
3. Write sections that stand alone
The 2023 research that named the field found that adding quotations, statistics and cited sources raised a page's share of AI answers, while keyword stuffing did not help. In practice, open each section with the direct answer, name the product instead of writing "it", and back the claim with a number and where it came from. The Citability Analyzer flags sections that lack a clear answer or evidence; its score is an editing aid, not a forecast that an engine will quote you.
4. Make the brand one entity
Use the same name in your Organization markup, og:site_name and titles, and link real profiles with sameAs. Brand Entity Checker tests those signals, including whether the logo loads and whether a Wikidata item lists your site.
5. Sample what the engines say
AI Answer Visibility asks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini one buyer question with web search on and reports who gets named and cited. AI Citation Finder lists the pages Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT cite for a topic. Answers vary between runs, so treat each run as a sample. For Google, add the free Generative AI performance report in Search Console, which counts impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Where seogeoaeo.ai stops
It does not track a prompt list every day or chart answers over time; a dedicated prompt tracker suits that job better. And Google says no outside tool can see its ranking systems, so every GEO result, ours included, describes what answers say rather than why. For a first look at where your site stands, and for coding agents that fix and recheck pages, start with the per-run checks. The seogeoaeo.ai GEO guide covers each step in more depth.