Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — The Complete Ranking Factors List
GEO is the next big thing — it stands for Generative Engine Optimization and means having your website cited by LLM-based AI search tools like Google AI Mode search, Google AI overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, SearchGPT, Andi, Bagoodex, Komo, Claude, DeepSeek, Microsoft Copilot, You.com, Arc search, Brave AI search, Opera AI, Bixby, Tencent, Qwen, Hix, Blackbox, Baidu, and many many more.
The point of GEO is to get your website or other online properties into the list of sources used by generative search tools.
AIRS (AI result sets) are the new SERPs — those are the sources that LLM AI tools cite for their users when they ask questions.
Each AI helper has a different design and presents a different amount of sources:
Compared to regular Search Engine Optimization, Generative Engine Optimization is even more fuzzy and guesswork-ridden.
While Google offers at least some sort of guidelines for SEO, Generative Engine Optimization had no clear rules, guidelines, or years of testing — except for maybe this post on succeeding in AI search published last week.
That post is pretty short so go read it, it deals with Google’s recommendations for AI Overviews as well as their new AI Mode.
To save you time — GEO is the next stage of SEO. But it’s also built on the same foundation — quality content and brand authority.
There’s a great opportunity for you to be a GEO trailblazer in your industry, so no matter what your marketing strategy was up till now, you have to tweak it.
I’ve mentioned AI search optimization previously but it’s time to build the definitive GEO ranking factor checklist for you.
Below is an absolutely free no-gimmick list of everything that matters for GEO and AI search optimization:
1) Publish more content
This includes all types of content across all channels.
Even with diminishing returns from SEO, your published content will probably be improving your GEO — the more present your brand is, the more likely AI search tools will consider it a reliable source.
So the foundation of GEO is not just to keep producing content, but to pump those numbers up.
If you need help scaling your blogging for that — reach out to us, we offer DFY blogging packages. And yes, we tweak them for GEO purposes.
While AI content writers are not optimal for content planning, they are amazing for repurposing content.
Feed your blog to them and make them turn your blog posts into snippets, quotes, and bite-size chunks for all channels.
2) Use human expertise
Ironically, you can’t get into AI search if you’re only using AI to produce your content.
You need leadership, expertise, and specificity.
Think of it this way — LLMs are secondary entities. They gather, process, and analyze material, and their creators trained them to detect and prioritize original, detailed, and relevant info.
That means your brand & content need to be the primary, leading entities.
You can’t just download a list of keywords that everyone uses and bang out 500-word listicles for each.
Do things for the humans you’re selling to.
That’s why thought leadership content is so important for your content strategy — here’s how to plan for it.
3) Use the right keywords for AI search
Understand that people use generative AI search differently.
The queries are personal, specific, and conversational, and they contain tons of background info.
People use AI search tools as their own assistants, and they want recommendations based on the facts they provide.
These are the typical searches you need to squeeze your way into:
“what plants should I plant into XYZ soil in LOCATION, I want it to grow fast and be shade-resistant”
“which electric vehicle do I pick — my daily commute is from X to Y and my budget is Z”
“what’s the best diet plan for me to gain muscle — I am a 44-year-old mom of 4 and I’ve previously played tennis professionally”
and so on.
Here’s how a search like that looks on Grok:
Reflect that in your website content.
To do well on generative search, become an assistant for your target market, and publish content with that in mind.
That means you have to
4) Narrow down and personalize
Your goal is to create specific bottom-of-the-funnel content tailored to exact customer personas.
Have a clear idea of who your target market is, and what their constraints and preferences are, and address all that by cross-matching it with your product and service features.
Go hyperlocal with your content — here’s how.
Reach out to me if you want a custom future-proof generative search plan of action for your website.
5) Work on your brand authority
If you haven’t done it yet, make sure you turn your business into a BIG BRAND in the eyes of Google.
Press releases, while an on-and-off thing for SEO, send powerful branding signals.
A lot of GEO boils down to convincing AI tools and models to include your brand content into their training data.
6) Prioritize your whole brand over individual pages
AI tools are looking at your impact and authoritativeness as a brand, and if you “convince” them, you will become a trusted source for their replies.
That is why you should prioritize your whole brand presence and perception in your GEO strategy.
SEO work views each individual landing page on your site separately — it’s an entity that can rank and pull organic traffic.
But that won’t happen in GEO if your brand is not widely present and authoritative.
Focus on your website as a whole, on your off-site properties, on authority signals, and everything else in this checklist rather than individual pages.
7) Off-page authority signals
These are not just backlinks, but plain text mentions as well.
That’s where press releases and other publicity stunts come in handy. Make sure your brand and product names are unique so text mentions will refer only to you.
However, a stronger backlink profile means your website will have bigger exposure in organic search, be it Google or Bing, and you want that for your GEO goals too.
With all the talk about the death of SEO, there are still no shortcuts to building links.
8) Distribute your content well
Set up a system if you haven’t yet.
Repurpose your content — every blog post needs to also be split into multiple LinkedIn posts, Tweets, faceless short videos, and ebooks — test everything and be represented on all platforms.
9) Go to where the people are
When you repurpose your blog content, make sure to distribute it where human conversations happen.
Establish a presence on Reddit, Quora, and other Q&A sites.
Google uses Reddit to train their AI and other companies do similar things to “teach” their AI assistants to be human.
And while AI tools obviously can’t be human, they are just instructed to hang around humans.
79% of consumers are expected to use AI-enhanced search within the next year and 70% already trust generative AI search results.
10) Use structured data
Bots are just bots and even though they’re great at reading, you need to feed them the right things and label everything correctly.
There are many kinds of formatting methods that help feed your content to bots easily. Text fragments, structured data, schema, and FAQs, are all great starting points.
11) Cite authority sources
AI Search tools are trained on authoritative sources, so you need to connect your content to the already established authority sources.
Authority outgoing links did matter for SEO too, although there was debate on the degree of their impact.
However, having enough citations is absolutely essential for GEO, as this study has found:
Including citations, quotations from relevant sources, and statistics can significantly boost source visibility
Start with sources that AI tools already like:
12) Innovate!
If you’re in a boring industry dominated by big players, you need to carve out a niche for yourself. Invent one if you have to, it’s often easier!
Even if you don’t need that business-wise (e.g. a generic offer works well enough), you need it content-marketing-wise.
To get fast-tracked in Generative Engine Optimization, you need to dominate specific questions that have not been covered anywhere before.
Once AI tools notice you in their training data for a certain topic, your authority may very well cross-pollinate to other areas.
13) Always be on the lookout
If you thought Google algo changes were impactful and hard to track, GEO will take that to absurd heights, because every individual AI assistant product has its’ own algo logic, ranking rules, and policies.
You always need to be aware of the latest developments in GEO, but the good news is that with so many products and companies competing for user experience, there will be endless loopholes.
Can you “teach” LLMs about your brand?
While you can train your AI assistants to write and act the way you need, you can’t really insert your information into them for other users.
Here’s what OpenAI says:
For publicly available internet content, we use only information that is freely and openly accessible on the internet. We do not intentionally gather data from sources known to be behind paywalls or from the dark web. Additionally, we apply filters to remove material we do not want our models to learn from, such as hate speech, adult content, sites that aggregate personal information, and spam. The remaining information is then used to train our models.
So you can’t really question-spam your way into AI search — at least for now.
GEO means you’re doing everything necessary to get into their training data next time they get updated, not training the ready models.
The challenges with GEO
Generative Engine Optimization is really new, and some say it’s overhyped.
However — we know how fast things move, and if you want your brand to be future-proof, keep the ranking factors above in mind.
Currently, the biggest challenges with GEO are:
It’s extremely tough to track.
You’d need to use all AI assistants for all your major queries to see if your site comes up — and then again, you can’t know if they’re just returning personalized results.
Tools like AI Search Grader by Mangools are a great help for measuring your brand perception in generative search, but they still have a long way to go.
No one tells you what’s under the hood.
Google has always been a big black box, but we had at least some webmaster guidelines from them, as well as decades of testing to find what works in SEO.
GEO is young and as much of a Wild West territory as SEO was in 2004.
We’ve no idea about the CTR.
There is no data on the amount of clicks that source links receive within LLM answers.
We can only guess that this number is extremely low — when AI search users ask for practical how-to stuff most of them only need the answer, and they are not interested in doing further research.
However, we’ve seen one of our clients get leads from ChatGPT for hypnotherapy and mental health-related questions.
With that said, you’re probably better off expecting branding benefits rather than generative engine search traffic.
I.e. do your best to get your brand into their training data and get them to view you as an authority. That will give you an advantage over your competition.
It’s just SEO… but with a twist.
After studying and observing everything related to generative engine optimization I can say that GEO is an extension of SEO but with more emphasis on branding, authority, and content leadership. So far.
All the Google’s ranking factors are still at play in GEO.
LLMs are designed to do what Google was claiming to have been doing all these years — detect authority.
You can obviously fake being an authority and fool them.
But you might as well become an authority in the process.
Helps everyone.
Further reading on GEO ranking factors:
https://zapier.com/blog/generative-engine-optimization/
https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1hl94a6/is_generative_engine_optimization_geo_or_ai/
https://mangools.com/ai-search-grader
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7842364-how-chatgpt-and-our-foundation-models-are-developed
https://www.contentpowered.com/blog/press-releases-seo/
https://mangools.com/blog/generative-engine-optimization/#llms-optimization-tips
https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1gsscpq/comment/lxgox3f/
https://searchengineland.com/what-is-generative-engine-optimization-geo-444418
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-02-19-gartner-predicts-search-engine-volume-will-drop-25-percent-by-2026-due-to-ai-chatbots-and-other-virtual-agents
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.09735
Want to get a piece of the generative search pie and boost your brand presence on AI search tools? Let’s talk!
