What is GEO: getting your brand into AI assistant answers

Why it matters now

Buyers increasingly ask an assistant instead of a search engine — and get one finished answer instead of ten links. That answer usually names two or three brands. For the buyer, everyone else simply does not exist at that moment.

The scale is already visible. Yandex reports that in Q2 2026 Alice AI answered 42% of queries in its search, and the monthly audience of those answers reached 49.5 million people (Yandex Q2 2026 results, in Russian (se abre en una pestaña nueva)). A Pew Research Center study found that when Google shows an AI summary, people click a regular result almost half as often: in 8% of visits versus 15% without one (Pew Research, July 2025 (se abre en una pestaña nueva)).

The takeaway is simple: if AI does not name your brand, some buyers will never reach you, even when your site ranks well.

How an AI assistant decides whom to name

Modern assistants rarely answer shopping questions from “memory” alone. More often they first search for fresh pages and then write the answer from them. Two things shape the result:

• What the model already “knows” about the category and brands from its training data.
• Which pages it finds right now — reviews, rankings, comparisons, marketplace listings, discussions, your own site.

Assistants lean on sources that answer the question directly and specifically, contain checkable facts and are trusted by other sites. If there are few such pages about your brand, or they are out of date, the assistant either leaves you out or gets facts wrong — a price, say, or whether you deliver.

How GEO differs from SEO

GEO does not replace SEO — it extends it. Search optimization still matters, because assistants often find their sources through search. But the goal and the way you measure it change.

One important point: Google states that appearing in its AI features needs no extra requirements or special optimization beyond normal SEO practice (Google Search Central (se abre en una pestaña nueva)). That is good news: GEO is not a bag of secret tricks but good content, a technically accessible site and reputation work — plus regular measurement.

What actually helps

The first major study of the topic is “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” by researchers from Princeton and other universities, presented at KDD 2024. They tested which edits to a page raise its visibility in generative answers and saw gains of up to 40% (arXiv:2311.09735 (se abre en una pestaña nueva)). The best results came from:

• citing authoritative sources in the text;
• quotations from experts and concrete numbers instead of vague claims;
• clear, fluent writing without filler.

Keyword stuffing barely helped. This is an experiment on research data, not a guarantee for your site, but it points the same way search engines do: useful, specific, verifiable content.

In practice, GEO work usually covers:

1. Access for AI crawlers. Make sure robots.txt and bot protection do not block assistants’ search crawlers, such as OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT (OpenAI (se abre en una pestaña nueva)) or YandexAdditional for Yandex (Yandex Webmaster (se abre en una pestaña nueva)).
2. Direct answers to buyers’ questions on your own site: what it is, what it costs, how it differs, who it suits — with facts that are easy to check.
3. Consistent facts everywhere. Prices, range, delivery and warranty terms should match on your site, on marketplaces and in directories.
4. Presence in the sources AI cites. Reviews, rankings, trade media, professional communities.
5. Regular measurement, so you know what worked.

What to measure

The core GEO metric is mention share: the percentage of AI answers to your buyers’ questions that name your brand, compared with competitors. Alongside it, watch:

• position in the answer — named first or at the end of a list;
• tone — does the assistant recommend you or warn against you;
• factual errors — wrong prices, features you do not have, outdated terms;
• sources — which sites the assistant cites for questions in your category.

Because AI answers are random, every share is an estimate. Ask 40 questions three times each, get 31% mentions, and the true share might be anywhere from about 25% to 37%. An honest report shows that range. Without it, a random swing is easy to mistake for success or failure.

How KleoGEO helps

KleoGEO regularly asks AI assistants — Alice AI, Yandex Neuro, ChatGPT, GigaChat and others — your buyers’ questions, several times each. Then it shows:

• how often each assistant names you and your competitors, with an accuracy range;
• where assistants get facts about you wrong, with the answer text as evidence;
• which sites they cite, so you know where you need to appear;
• what changed since the last check and what to fix first.

You can start with a free check: it shows whether AI names your brand right now.

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