GEO is influencing what generative models write about you: the description, the framing, the comparison you get slotted into. It runs on consensus rather than pages. You win it by making the same true facts easy to find in many independent places, and by publishing the exact language you want repeated.
What GEO actually means
Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of influencing the text a generative model produces about you. Not whether your URL appears — whether the sentence is flattering, accurate and complete.
The distinction matters because being cited badly is a real outcome. A model can name you as the expensive option, the one that only serves enterprise, the one that closed in 2023. All three are citations. None of them are wins.
AEO gets you into the room. GEO decides how you are introduced.
Generative answers run on consensus, not pages
A retrieval system reads a few pages and paraphrases. A generative model, working from what it absorbed in training, is doing something closer to averaging: it has seen your business described a few hundred times and it produces the description that most sources agree on.
This is why a beautiful homepage rewrite changes nothing for months. The model is not reading your homepage. It is remembering the aggregate of every directory listing, review summary, press mention and forum thread that ever described you — most of which you did not write.
Entity consensus — the description of you that emerges when independent sources are averaged. GEO is the work of moving that average, which is slower and stickier than moving a ranking.
The four levers that move a generative answer
Pick a single sentence describing what you do, who for, and where. Use it verbatim on your site, every directory, every profile, every press boilerplate. Variation reads as uncertainty; repetition reads as fact.
Models reuse phrasing. If you want to be described as “fixed-price AI visibility reporting for agencies,” that exact phrase must exist in text, in several places, attached to your name.
One third-party page stating your facts outweighs five of your own. Local press, association directories, partner sites, review platforms, credible roundups.
Old prices, closed locations, previous company names and dead service lines keep getting averaged in. Hunt them down and get them corrected or delisted.
Write for the sentence you want quoted
Practical rule: for every important claim, write the version you would be happy to see pasted into an answer. Short, declarative, self-contained, no pronouns pointing back at earlier paragraphs.
The left column is marketing copy. The right column is source material. Models cannot quote the left column into a useful answer, so they skip you and quote a competitor who wrote plainly.
When the answer is wrong
Assume every wrong statement has a source. Search the exact false claim, find where it lives, correct it there. Then wait for the next crawl or index refresh and re-ask. Arguing with the chatbot in a chat window changes nothing beyond that conversation.
Track corrections as a list with dates. It is the only way to tell whether an answer changed because of your work or because the model shipped an update.
Common questions
Is GEO just PR?
It overlaps heavily. The difference is the target: PR is written for humans reading a publication, GEO is written for a model averaging thousands of sources. Same activity, different success metric.
How is this different from AEO?
AEO optimizes for being retrieved and cited. GEO optimizes for the content of the generated sentence. In practice they share most of the same fixes — see AEO vs GEO vs SEO.
Can I opt out of being described?
You can block crawlers, which usually means being described from older or worse sources rather than not being described at all. Silence is not neutrality.
How long does consensus take to shift?
Three to nine months for a well-established wrong description. Faster if the false claim only exists in one or two places.
The free check asks six engines about your business and shows you the answers.