Joe AshtaGEO / AEO Consultant
Published by Joe Ashta under his editorial policy Reviewed 7 September 2026 Report a correction
SEO / GEO / AEO

Generative Engine Optimization

Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, is the discipline of earning visibility inside AI-generated answers. It is the field Joe Ashta practises as a GEO / AEO consultant for law firms. This page defines the term, traces where it came from, separates it from SEO and AEO, and states what it means for a law firm.

Definition

GEO is the practice of shaping how a business appears across the whole generative process: whether an AI system retrieves the business's pages, whether it treats them as grounding, whether it cites them, whether it names the business in the answer, and whether it recommends the business as something to hire. The glossary on this site defines each of those outcomes. GEO is the umbrella over all of them.

The word "engine" carries the meaning. A search engine returns documents. A generative engine reads documents and writes an answer. Optimizing for the second is a different job from optimizing for the first, even though the second depends on the first.

Where the term comes from

GEO began as an academic term. It was introduced in a 2023 research paper by researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi, who set out to study how content could be made more visible in the answers of generative systems. The paper gave the field a name, a framing (visibility inside generated responses in place of position in ranked lists), and a first set of findings about which kinds of content change moved that visibility.

The term held in research and in the parts of the industry closest to research. Practitioners, meanwhile, had started using a second term for the same problem, and the two now coexist.

GEO and SEO

SEO earns position in a list of links. GEO earns presence in an answer. The difference is easiest to see in what each one reports. An SEO report shows rankings and organic traffic. A GEO report shows how often the business is named, and where the AI system got its information.

The two are connected. Generative systems ground their answers in pages they retrieve, and retrieval favours pages that are already well organized, well linked and well regarded, which is what SEO produces. So GEO builds on SEO. A firm with weak SEO usually has weak GEO, because the system has little of the firm's own material to read. A firm with strong SEO can still have weak GEO, because ranking a page and being named in an answer are different events.

GEO and AEO

AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, is the narrower practitioner term. Where GEO covers the entire generative process, AEO concentrates on the last step: being named in the answer, and named as a recommendation. AEO is the revenue layer of GEO. Academic usage leans GEO; practitioner usage leans AEO. The two are correlated, and a consultant who does one is doing most of the other, which is why the role on this site is written GEO / AEO consultant.

The next page in the chain, Answer Engine Optimization, takes that narrower term on its own.

What GEO optimizes

Four outcomes, in the order an AI system produces them.

  • Grounding. The business's pages are retrieved and placed in the system's context before it writes. Invisible to the buyer, and a prerequisite for everything below.
  • Citations. The system shows a link to the business's site as a source. A citation proves the system read the page. It does not prove the business was recommended.
  • Mentions. The business is named in the answer text. A mention is what the buyer actually sees, and it cannot be bought from a data vendor; it has to be observed.
  • Recommendations. The business is named as something to hire. The highest-value outcome, and the one AEO exists to produce.

What GEO means for a law firm

A person who needs a lawyer now asks an AI system in plain language and gets a short list of named firms back. The firms on that list were put there by the process above. Your firm is on it or it is absent, and page-one rankings alone do not decide which.

For a firm, GEO work means four things: making the firm's identity unambiguous across its site, its profiles and the records third parties hold about it; putting structured data in place so a machine can read that identity without guessing; publishing pages that give an AI system something worth quoting on the questions clients ask; and earning the independent corroboration that lets a system prefer the firm over others with the same practice area in the same city. The outcome is reported as a mention rate.

Joe Ashta's published work in this field is the BigLaw GEO Leaderboard, which ranks 118 US law firms by AI search citations reported by Ahrefs. The canonical statement of his role is the entity record. The page before this one, Brand in AI answers, describes what a brand is to an AI system and the ladder from retrieval to default answer that this discipline works on. The role itself is described in prose at GEO consultant for law firms.