GlossaryGenerative engine optimization (GEO)
What is generative engine optimization?
Generative engine optimization is the practice of making a site more likely to be found, read and cited by AI assistants, the way search engine optimization does for search engines.
Also called: GEO, AI SEO, answer engine optimization, AEO.
Most GEO tools measure from the outside: they ask assistants questions and check whether your brand appears in the answers. That shows the result but not the mechanism.
Server logs show the mechanism. Whether an ai search crawler is indexing you, which pages assistants read in a live fetch, and whether your robots.txt is blocking the crawler you meant to allow, are all visible in the log before any answer is generated. A site that blocks OAI-SearchBot will not appear in ChatGPT search however good its content is.
The practical checklist is short: allow the search and live fetch agents you want to be cited by, decide about training crawlers separately, make sure the pages that matter return 200 to those agents, and watch which pages they actually read.
Related terms
- AI citation: An AI citation is an assistant naming or linking your page in its answer.
- AI search crawler: An AI search crawler is a crawler that builds the index an AI assistant searches and cites from.
- robots.txt token: A robots.txt token is the name an operator tells you to use in the User-agent line of robots.txt to address one of its crawlers.
Published 2026-09-21, updated 2026-09-21.