What is GEO?

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of getting your brand named — accurately and often — in the answers AI assistants generate when buyers ask their questions. It's the new layer on top of SEO: instead of competing for a ranking on a search results page, you're competing to be in the AI's shortlist when it synthesizes a single answer for the user.

Why GEO exists now

For a growing slice of buyers, the AI answer is the search. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overview, or Microsoft Copilot, get a synthesized answer that names a handful of brands, and pick from there — without ever clicking a blue link.

That changes the game in three ways:

• There are no 10 blue links anymore. The AI gives one answer, and it names a few brands. If you're not in those few, you're not in the consideration set.
• Click-through stops being the metric. Often there's no click at all. What matters is whether your brand is named in the answer — a mention.
• There's not one algorithm — there's one per engine. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview each have their own training data, their own live-search behavior, and their own ranking logic. Optimizing for one doesn't automatically optimize for the others.

What GEO measures

GEO replaces "rankings" with three things you can actually move:

• Mentions — when an AI answer explicitly names your brand. This is the headline signal; it drives Visibility Score and Share of Voice. See What's the difference between mentions and citations?.
• Citations — when an AI answer cites a content source it consulted. Citations are the lever for moving mentions: the AI didn't invent its shortlist; it built it from the sources it read. See What are "cited sources" and why do they matter?.
• Sentiment and Brand Alignment — once you're mentioned, is the AI describing you accurately and favorably? See How is my visibility score (and Share of Voice) calculated?.

What you actually optimize

You optimize the inputs the AI consults, not the AI itself:

• Your own pages — answer-first prose, on a crawlable site (raw HTML, not JavaScript-only). See Verify AI tools can read your pages.
• The third-party sources the AI already trusts — comparators, review sites, industry media. The AI's cited-sources view tells you which domains to earn coverage on.
• Across every engine you care about — what works on Perplexity may be invisible on Gemini. Plan per-engine.

This is content-and-authority work, not a config change. Expect a few weeks for early movement and a few months for durable gains.

How GEO relates to SEO

GEO doesn't replace SEO — it sits on top of it. A strong SEO footprint is one of the biggest inputs to GEO, because AI engines consult well-ranking pages. But SEO alone isn't enough: a page that ranks #1 on Google can be invisible to ChatGPT if your site is JavaScript-rendered, or if the third-party domains the AI consults don't mention you. The full breakdown is in What is the difference between GEO and SEO?.

How GetMint helps

GetMint runs your buying-question prompts against the major AI surfaces on a recurring cadence (weekly on Starter), measures whether your brand is mentioned, surfaces the citations behind the answers, and gives you a workflow to act on the gaps:

• Insights & Reports — Visibility, Share of Voice, Sentiment, Brand Alignment per topic and per model.
• Influence: Sources & Citations — the cited-domains view that turns gaps into placement targets.
• Content Studio — brief, write, and distribute content built to be cited.
• Shopping — the same loop for buying queries, scoped to AI shopping surfaces.

See How do I set up my first domain? to start.

Key takeaways

• GEO = getting your brand named in AI-generated answers, not ranking a URL on a SERP.
• AI search has no 10 blue links — one answer, a shortlist of brands. If you're not in it, you're not considered.
• One algorithm per engine — plan and measure per AI surface (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overview, Microsoft Copilot).
• You optimize the inputs: your own crawlable pages and the third-party sources AI already trusts.
• GEO sits on top of SEO, not instead of it. Both matter.