GEO: the SEO strategy Google won't tell you about (but ChatGPT will)

There's a stat that changed how I think about search: 65% of Google searches now end without a click. People get their answer from the AI Overview and leave.

If your entire SEO strategy is built around getting clicks from search results, you have a problem. A growing number of your potential customers are getting answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude instead of clicking through to websites.

The question isn't whether this is happening. It's whether your content shows up in those answers.

What GEO actually means

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It's a term from a 2023 Princeton University research paper (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024). The core idea is simple: traditional SEO optimizes your content to rank in search results. GEO optimizes your content to be cited by AI.

The distinction matters. AI search engines don't rank pages in a list. They synthesize answers from multiple sources and cite the ones they pull from. Being cited is the new ranking.

What the research found

The Princeton team tested nine optimization methods across 10,000 queries. Here's what moved the needle:

Adding citations to authoritative sources increased AI visibility by up to 40%. Including specific statistics with sources boosted it by 37%. Expert quotes with proper attribution added 30%. Writing with an authoritative, confident tone helped by 25%.

The single worst thing you could do? Keyword stuffing. It decreased visibility by 10%. AI engines are specifically good at detecting it and they penalize for it.

The best combination the researchers found: fluency (well-written, easy to read) plus statistics (specific numbers with sources). Together they produced the highest overall boost.

How each AI engine works differently

This is the part that surprised me. Each AI search engine finds and cites content differently.

ChatGPT weights domain authority heavily. Sites with over 350,000 referring domains average 8.4 citations. Content updated within the last 30 days gets cited 3.2 times more than older content. And branded domains (your own site) get cited 11 percentage points more than third-party content about you.

Perplexity uses its own retrieval system with three layers of ranking. It has manual lists of authoritative domains (Amazon, GitHub, academic sites) that get automatic boosts. Interestingly, it prioritizes PDF documents and pages with FAQ schema markup.

Google AI Overviews only overlap with traditional top-10 results about 15% of the time. They weight E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust) and structured data heavily. Authoritative citations boost visibility by 132% in AI Overviews specifically.

Claude uses Brave Search, not Google or Bing. Its crawl-to-refer ratio is 38,065:1, meaning it reads enormous amounts of content but cites very selectively. It favors high factual density and clear structure.

What to actually do about it

First, check your robots.txt. Make sure these bots are allowed: GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai, Googlebot, Bingbot. If you're blocking any of them, AI engines literally can't find you.

Second, restructure your content. Use "answer-first" format: put the direct answer at the top of each section, then elaborate. AI engines extract from the beginning of sections more often than the end.

Third, add FAQPage schema markup to your pages. The Princeton research and Perplexity's own documentation both suggest this increases citation rates. It's a few lines of JSON-LD in your page header.

Fourth, include statistics with sources. Not "studies show that..." but "according to a 2024 Stanford study, developer productivity increased 55% with AI tools (Chen et al., 2024)." Specific, sourced, verifiable.

Fifth, update your content regularly. ChatGPT's citation data shows a strong preference for content less than 30 days old. Even small updates to existing posts can refresh them in the eyes of AI crawlers.

The uncomfortable truth

You're now optimizing for two completely different systems. Traditional Google SEO still matters — it's still where most traffic comes from. But AI search is growing fast, and the content that works well for traditional SEO doesn't automatically work for GEO.

The good news: well-written content with real data, clear structure, and authoritative citations tends to do well in both. The bad news: if you've been relying on keyword density and link schemes, AI engines are going to ignore you.

ClawKit applies GEO techniques automatically when generating content. But even if you're doing this manually, the principles are straightforward: be specific, cite your sources, structure clearly, and update often.

The businesses that figure out GEO now will own the AI search results in 12 months. The ones that wait will be wondering why their traffic is declining even though their Google rankings look fine.