LLM Citation

The practice of optimising content so it is cited, summarised, and quoted by generative answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude. GEO shares fundamentals with SEO — clear authorship, factual accuracy, structured content, strong entity signals — but rewards content that is quotable, well-attributed, and directly answers a question in a single passage an LLM can lift. It is rapidly becoming a parallel acquisition channel to organic search.

The practice of structuring content so it is selected by AI-powered answer engines — including Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, and Perplexity — as the direct response to a query. AEO focuses on concise, authoritative, well-sourced answers rather than traditional keyword density.

A concept from a Google patent describing how search results may be scored by how much new information a document adds relative to pages the user has already seen on the same query. The practical implication is that publishing another near-identical guide on a saturated topic adds little value; pages that introduce original data, a novel framing, or a unique perspective earn stronger rankings and more AI-answer citations.

Google search summaries generated with AI that synthesise information from multiple sources. Pages are more likely to appear in AI Overviews when they are well-structured, trustworthy, and clearly answer intent.