SEO (search engine optimization) is the work of ranking a page in a list of links. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the work of getting a business named and cited inside an answer written by an AI engine. For a small business, most of the groundwork is shared. What changes is what you measure and whose pages the answer relies on.
This article covers two engines: Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, the AI summary shown at the top of some Google results.
Where the term GEO comes from
The term comes from a research paper, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" by Aggarwal and co-authors. It was first submitted to arXiv on 16 November 2023 and accepted at KDD 2024, a data science conference. The authors describe GEO as a way to help content creators improve the visibility of their content in generative engine responses.
The paper reports that GEO "can boost visibility by up to 40%" in generative engine responses. Read that figure with care. It is a best result on the authors' research benchmark, measured on test queries. The same paper notes that effectiveness "varies across domains", so a method that helps in one field may do little in another.
What stays the same
The technical basics stay the same: an engine has to be able to read and index your pages. Google's documentation says that to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. There are no extra requirements on top of normal Search eligibility.
Perplexity runs its own crawler, a program that fetches web pages. It is called PerplexityBot, and Perplexity says it is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity and is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. If your robots.txt file, the file that tells crawlers what they may fetch, blocks PerplexityBot, Perplexity cannot read your pages for its search results.
What changes
You measure mentions, not positions
An AI answer has no public rank. The question becomes whether the answer names your business, links to your site, or leaves you out.
Fewer clicks reach the results below the summary
Clicks drop when an AI summary appears. Pew Research Center analysed the web browsing data of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025: 68,879 Google searches, of which 12,593 produced an AI summary. Users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional result link in 8% of visits. Without a summary they did so in 15% of visits. Clicks on links inside the summary itself happened in 1% of visits. These are Google figures for US users.
One answer draws on several sources
Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use a "query fan-out" technique, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources to build a response. In the same Pew dataset, 88% of AI summaries cited three or more sources. Your own page is one input among several.
Other sites' descriptions of you carry weight
The answer often relies on pages about you that you do not own. In our study of Perplexity answers, we asked "best SEO agency in
Answers vary between runs
The same question can produce a different answer the next time. In a second sample from the same study, 10 questions asked twice on Perplexity, the lists of named agencies overlapped by 0.72 on average (Jaccard similarity, where 1.0 means an identical list). One check is a weak signal. We run each prompt 3 times per engine and count rates across runs.
What a small business should do first
Start with access, then measure, then fix the sources the answers use.
- Check access. Open your robots.txt and confirm PerplexityBot is not blocked. Ask whoever runs your hosting or firewall whether a bot-blocking setting is on.
- Check Google eligibility. Search for your key pages in Google and confirm they appear with a text snippet. A page missing from the index cannot be a supporting link in AI Overviews.
- Write down your buyers' questions. Use the words customers use on the phone and in emails. Ten questions is enough to start.
- Ask them on both engines, more than once. Note who is named, which sites are cited, and anything wrong about you.
- Fix the sources the answers use. Correct or complete your listings on the directories and review sites that keep appearing.
- Make one page answer each common question directly. Put the answer in the first sentence under a clear heading.
- Repeat the same questions a month later with the same wording, and compare.
Our free GEO audit runs 10 buyer questions through Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, 3 times each, and shows where you appear today. It gives you a baseline for step 7.