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Definition

What is generative engine optimization?

Generative engine optimization is the work of making a brand easier to fetch, easier to describe accurately, and easier for an answer engine to justify naming.

People shorten that to GEO. The phrase showed up as teams noticed buyers asking chat products for “the best tool” instead of clicking ten blue links. The useful version of the idea is narrow: write pages that state facts a model can repeat, and do not block the crawlers those products use.

The inflated version promises a number-one slot in ChatGPT. Nobody outside the model provider can sell that. Answers move when the prompt, the account, or the day changes. A serious GEO practice records samples and improves the underlying pages. It does not publish a fake rank.

Run a free check

Brand, website, and an optional category. You get a shareable report with a citability score, a prompt pack, and a paste scorer.

Check a brand
Homepage, robots.txt, and llms.txt only. The report page is public.

We request the homepage, /robots.txt, and /llms.txt.

Fills prompts such as “best {category} tools 2026”.

Free. No account. 8 checks per hour and 30 per day from one network. Turnstile runs only when the site operator configures it.

Three layers you can tell apart

  1. Access. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended can fetch the URLs you care about. See the crawler guide.
  2. Clarity. The brand string matches in the title, the H1, the Organization schema, and llms.txt. A model that has to reconcile three names will often pick none.
  3. Corroboration. Other pages, not only your homepage, describe the same product. The kinds of sources that often get repeated are listed in sources answers often trust. We do not pretend to count them.

A first week that stays small

Run one citability check. Ship the top fixes that are actually missing, not a redesign. Publish or repair /llms.txt. Ask four prompts in the chat products your buyers use, and paste the answers so the mention, the position, and the neighboring names are written down. Stop there. Weekly charts can wait; the waitlist on this site is for that, and it is not a product yet.

If you want the free workflow in one place, start at the AI visibility checker.

Questions

Is GEO a ranking factor inside ChatGPT?

There is no public ranking factor list for consumer chat answers. GEO is a name for the work of being fetchable, consistent, and corroborated. Anyone who sells a guaranteed model rank is guessing.

What can I change this week?

Crawler access, a real /llms.txt, a title and H1 that use the brand, FAQ markup that matches visible questions, and one page that compares you with named alternatives.

What can I not change from my CMS?

Model weights, a user’s memory, and whether a third party chooses to mention you. Those show up when you paste answers, not in a homepage crawl.

How does this relate to SEO?

SEO still matters. GEO adds crawlers and citation-shaped pages. The side-by-side note is on the GEO and SEO guide.

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