What is GEO (generative engine optimization)?

Why it is a separate discipline

A search engine returns a list and lets the person choose. A generative engine chooses on the person's behalf and returns a paragraph. That single difference changes what you are optimizing for: not a position, but a model's confidence that naming you is safe and useful.

Confidence is built differently than rank. A model becomes confident when several independent sources describe you the same way, when your own content states things plainly enough to be lifted without editing, and when nothing contradicts it.

What actually moves it

In practice four things carry most of the weight, and they are not the four most people work on.

• Entity clarity: one consistent description of who you are and what you do, identical everywhere it appears, on your site and off it.
• Extractable answers: self-contained blocks of forty to sixty words that survive being pulled out of the page with no surrounding context.
• Corroboration: independent third-party sources saying the same thing, which is what converts a model's guess into a citation.
• Machine-readable delivery: server-rendered HTML, complete structured data, clean URLs, and an llms.txt so an assistant can ingest the site cheaply.

What does not move it much

Keyword density, word count, and publishing frequency for its own sake. A model does not reward a two-thousand-word article for being long; it rewards the one paragraph inside it that answered the question cleanly. Most of the article was overhead.