GEO Optimization: How to Get Cited in AI Answers

69 percent of all Google searches in 2026 end without a single click on a website. For searches that trigger an AI overview, that number climbs to 83 percent. The answer sits right there in the results, assembled from the two to seven sources the AI system decided to trust. If you are not one of those sources, you no longer exist for a growing share of your customers. GEO optimization is the work that gets you into that set.

The term sounds like the next marketing acronym, and part of the industry treats it that way. The difference is that here there is an actual study with actual numbers. I will walk through it instead of making you promises.

What GEO Optimization Is, and What It Is Not

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It means deliberately preparing your website and your public listings so that AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google with its AI Overviews, Claude and Copilot can find, understand and cite you as a source in their answers.

It is not the same as SEO. Classic SEO fights for one of the ten blue links on the Google results page. GEO fights for one of the few slots an AI actually builds into its answer. The field is narrower, but whoever gets in gets the full attention instead of position seven.

Why This Is Tipping Right Now

The shift is not theoretical, it is in the numbers. According to Gartner, 35 percent of Gen Z use AI tools as their first stop for research questions, against 19 percent for millennials and 7 percent for Gen X. The Previsible AI Traffic Report for the first five months of 2025 recorded a 527 percent jump in sessions arriving from AI systems.

And this traffic is not just any traffic. Visitors who arrive through ChatGPT convert at roughly 14 to 16 percent, through Perplexity at around 10 percent. For comparison, classic Google traffic sits at 1.76 percent. That makes sense once you think about it. Someone who asks an AI for a recommendation and gets a name has half made the decision already. Someone clicking through ten links is still searching.

How an AI Decides Who to Name

The mechanism behind it is called query fan-out, and understanding it explains almost everything else. When you ask an AI something, it does not simply type your question into a search engine. It breaks the question into several smaller sub-questions and searches for each one separately. "Which web designer on Mallorca handles AI visibility" quietly becomes sub-questions like "web design agencies Mallorca", "GEO optimization providers" and "AI visibility services Spain".

For each sub-question the model pulls a handful of sources and builds an answer from them. Your job in GEO optimization is therefore not to rank first for one keyword. It is to keep showing up as a clean, citable source across the many small sub-questions around what you offer. That rewards clarity and substance, not tricks.

What Measurably Works, and What Is Just Buzzword

This is where it gets concrete. The foundational study on GEO comes from researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi (Aggarwal and colleagues, published at ACM KDD 2024). They tested six content strategies across 10,000 search queries and measured how much each shifted visibility in AI answers. The result is refreshingly down to earth.

The strongest effect came from citing sources. For lower ranked pages that lifted visibility in AI answers by up to 115 percent. Adding concrete statistics to the text gave plus 41 percent. Direct quotes from experts plus 28 percent. On top came linguistic clarity and an authoritative, factual voice. Across all measures the gain reached up to 40 percent more visibility.

Just as telling is what did not work. Keyword stuffing, the mechanical repetition of search terms, scored 10 percent worse than no optimization at all. The old SEO reflexes actively hurt here. An AI does not judge how often a term appears, it judges whether a paragraph answers a question cleanly, with evidence, and in a self-contained way.

That is the real message of this piece: GEO optimization is to a large degree simply good, honest writing backed by evidence. Cite numbers, name sources, write clearly, finish one thought per paragraph. None of it is a secret someone needs to sell you for a monthly subscription.

GEO Optimization Against Classic SEO

The two belong together, but they aim at different things. SEO gets you onto the Google results page. GEO gets you into the generated answer above it and into the AI chats beside it. Clean SEO is the foundation and helps the AI find your page too. But it no longer suffices on its own. Whoever sits at the top of Google today still often goes unnamed by ChatGPT, because the model goes by other signals: clarity, verifiability, and the consistency of your company data across different platforms.

In practice that means you no longer optimize only for the Google algorithm, but for a model that actually reads your text and wants to understand it. That is harder to manipulate and easier to do honestly well.

The Technical Layer Many People Skip

Between your good text and the AI sits a technical layer that decides whether the model can even take the text in cleanly. Four building blocks matter most. Structured data in JSON-LD format, so the AI knows unambiguously who you are and what you offer. An llms.txt that sums up your company in clear sentences. A robots.txt that lets the AI crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Google in, rather than accidentally locking them out. And semantic, cleanly readable HTML instead of text loaded later through JavaScript, because most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript.

This layer is the part an agency can take off your hands, and the reason we do not sell GEO as a detached magic trick but as part of a cleanly built website. If you want to see how that looks with us, it is laid out in detail under AI Visibility and GEO as a service.

What You Can Check Yourself Today

The honest thing about GEO is that nobody can sell it to you as a finished product, which means nobody can keep it secret from you either. The fastest first step costs nothing: ask your own AI. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity, make sure web search is on, and have it honestly tell you whether you get named when someone asks for a provider like you, and what you are missing. Three ready-made prompts for that, plus which steps only you can take, are on our page AI visibility, honestly explained.

Part of the work cannot be delegated. Your listings on Microsoft Bing Places, Apple Business Connect and your Google Business Profile feed many AI answers directly, and only the owner can create them. That is built that way on purpose, so nobody registers companies that are not theirs.

The Limits, Honestly

Anyone who guarantees you the number one spot in ChatGPT is selling you something. AI models decide on their own, change constantly, and nobody has direct access. The technical basics often take effect within days to a few weeks, building real, cited presence takes weeks to months. Nothing happens overnight.

This is not theory. We publish our own citation history, straight from the Microsoft Bing Webmaster dashboard, in the GEO case study. Not because we bought a service, but because we did exactly the work described in this text.

Where This Is Heading

The companies that show up in AI answers in 2027 are not the ones with the biggest marketing budget. They are the ones that started in 2026 to build their website so a machine can read it cleanly and recommend it honestly. That is less glamorous than a growth hack and considerably more durable. Ask your own AI today where you stand. The answer is the most honest starting point you will get.