If you run an online store, someone has probably offered you "GEO" by now. It's sold as SEO for AI: what you need to do so that ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI answers recommend your products. It also goes by AEO or LLMO, and the fact that there are three names for much the same thing tells you how unsettled it still is.

Before paying for it, it's worth knowing where the term comes from and what has actually been shown.

Where GEO comes from

The name comes from a study published in 2023 by researchers from Princeton and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, among others, and presented at the KDD conference in 2024. They called it GEO (generative engine optimisation): optimising content so it appears more often in the answers AI search engines generate.

They tried several ways of rewriting text and measured how often it then showed up in answers. What worked best was adding quotations, statistics and references to sources, with gains of up to 40% on their benchmark and up to 22% in a test on Perplexity. What didn't work was stuffing in keywords, which actually made things worse.

It's a good study, but it has an important limit: in each test only one piece of content was optimised and the rest weren't.

What came next

In 2025, another group of researchers tested the idea in more realistic conditions: several competitors optimising at once, and tasks that included product recommendations. Their work, presented at NeurIPS, reached an awkward conclusion: most methods of this kind were largely ineffective and often made a document's position worse.

On top of that, the more competitors used the same techniques, the less each one gained. What made far more difference was the usual thing: getting the source higher up in the results the AI draws on. In other words, SEO.

What Google says

Google says it plainly in its documentation for site owners: there are no additional requirements or special optimisations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The same SEO best practices apply, and to be shown as a supporting link in those answers, a page has to be indexed and eligible to appear in Google with a snippet.

What has changed is how you measure it. Since June 2026, Search Console has had its own reports for Google's AI features, and since the end of August they've been available for every site. They show how often your pages appeared in those answers, which pages, in which countries and on which devices.

So what really changes?

Less than people are selling, but some things do:

  • There are more places to show up. Not just Google, but ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot too, each with its own bots and sources. If you accidentally block OAI-SearchBot, OpenAI's search crawler, your pages won't show up in ChatGPT's search answers however good your SEO is. I cover this in how products show up in ChatGPT.
  • Questions tend to be longer and more specific. People don't type "trail shoes", they type "trail shoes for a beginner who weighs 90 kilos". Google also runs several related searches behind the scenes to answer. So pages that answer specific questions probably stand a better chance of being used.
  • What's said about you elsewhere counts too. ChatGPT, for example, takes third-party content into account and summarises public reviews. Your product page matters, but it isn't the only source.
  • Clicks no longer tell the whole story. You can appear in an answer without anyone clicking. And the new Search Console reports focus on exactly those appearances.

What stays the same

Almost everything that matters:

  • Your store can be crawled and indexed, loads quickly and doesn't hide its content.
  • Your product pages have complete information: measurements, materials, who it's for, compatibility. How to prepare your catalogue for AI has a practical checklist.
  • Your copy answers what people really ask, not a list of keywords.
  • Your product details match across your site, marketplaces and anywhere else you sell.

What I'd do if I ran a small store

  1. Be wary of anyone promising positions in ChatGPT. No agency controls what an AI assistant says, and the 2025 study found most of these tricks barely work, and what little they gain shrinks as more people use them.
  2. Check you're not blocking AI search bots in your robots.txt.
  3. Complete your product pages and add the questions customers ask you, with the answers, on the product page itself. I explain how to spot them in the unanswered questions that stop online sales.
  4. Look at the new Search Console report and at visits coming from chatgpt.com, to see whether any of this affects you yet.

There's some truth in GEO: the way people search is changing and it's worth keeping in mind. But on what we know today, the best way to show up in AI answers looks a lot like the best way to show up in Google: having the best information about what you sell.