What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
GEO is the work of getting your business mentioned and recommended when someone asks an AI assistant a question, instead of only ranking in a list of links.
Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, is the practice of shaping how AI assistants describe and recommend your business. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity a question, the model writes a direct answer and often names a few companies. GEO is the work of being one of the names it cites.
Why it matters now
A growing share of buying research starts with a question typed into an AI assistant rather than a search box. The person asking does not get ten links to compare. They get a short answer with two or three businesses named in it. If yours is not one of them, that customer never learns you exist, and there is no second page to reach.
This is different from a search ranking. A model is not sorting pages by relevance. It is writing a sentence, and it decides which businesses to put in that sentence based on what it has read across the web.
How GEO differs from SEO
SEO is about ranking a page so a person clicks it. GEO is about being cited in an answer the person may never click through. You can rank first in Google and still go unmentioned by every AI assistant, because the two systems read the web differently and reward different things.
What makes an AI cite you
- Content that states plainly what you do, who you serve, and where, in language a model can lift word for word.
- Mentions, reviews, and references on other sites the model has read and tends to trust.
- A consistent name, category, and location everywhere your business appears online.
- Structured data that tells machines exactly what your business is.
- Being quoted or listed alongside the competitors the model already knows.
Where to start
Start by asking the assistants directly what they say about you, and about your category. You will quickly see whether you are mentioned, how you are described, and who gets recommended instead. Then close the gaps. That is exactly what Worth Citing automates: it runs those questions across the major models and returns a ranked list of what to fix first.
See where you stand
Worth Citing runs this check for you: it asks the major AI models about your brand and hands back three scores and a prioritized action plan.