AI Chatbot Glossary
What Is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a website's content more likely to be used, cited, and recommended by generative AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews.
Definition
GEO adapts SEO for engines that synthesise an answer instead of listing links. The term comes from a 2023 academic paper that measured which content changes raised a source's visibility in generated answers; the strongest signals were adding citations, statistics, quotations, and clear, authoritative phrasing. In practice GEO combines crawlable, well-structured pages; consistent entity information about the brand across the web (name, category, founder, location); explicit facts and numbers rather than slogans; and machine-readable aids such as schema markup and, optionally, an llms.txt file. Because generative engines draw on third-party sources too, reviews, comparisons, and listicle mentions count as much as your own pages.
Why Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Matters for AI Chatbots
If an assistant recommends three chatbots or three running shoes and yours is not one of them, no amount of on-page ranking helps. GEO is how a store or SaaS earns those mentions. Chatonbo applies GEO to its own marketing (this glossary is written so each first sentence is a quotable definition) and gives store owners one concrete input: a report of unanswered visitor questions, which is a direct list of content that both shoppers and AI engines are looking for.
See it in practice:
Read our GEO and AI visibility guidesRelated Terms
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so that answer engines, including AI assistants, voice assistants, and search features like featured snippets, can extract and present it as a direct answer to a question.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed plain-text Markdown file placed at the root of a website (for example, example.com/llms.txt) that gives large language models a concise, curated summary of the site and links to its most important pages.
Large Language Model (LLM)
An LLM is an AI model trained on vast amounts of text that can understand and generate human language - LLMs like GPT-5.4, Claude, and Gemini power modern chatbots.
Generative AI
Generative AI is a category of AI that creates new content - text, images, code - instead of just classifying or predicting from existing data.