GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of making a website readable, parseable, and citable by generative AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews — rather than optimizing purely for ranking in a traditional search results list. It shares its technical foundation with SEO (crawlability, structured data, clean HTML) but targets a different outcome: being quoted inside an AI-generated answer, not ranking a link.
In practice
GEO work centers on three things: making sure AI crawlers can actually fetch a page (crawler access), making sure the content is readable without executing JavaScript and states its answer plainly near the top (content readability), and marking up what the page is about with structured data (JSON-LD) so an engine doesn't have to infer it from prose.
On Shopify, WordPress, and Next.js
The checks are the same regardless of platform — crawler access, server-rendered content, structured data — but the how differs by platform tooling. See a live breakdown for any URL with a free scan.
Related
GEO vs. SEO · AEO · AI crawler · JSON-LD