Adding relevant statistics, quotes, and citations can increase your content’s visibility in search engines by up to 40%, according to a recent research paper.
This finding comes from a paper titled GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. It is written by researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech, The Allen Institute of AI and IIT Delhi.
What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). The GEO is described in the document as:
“A new paradigm to help content creators improve the visibility of their content in Generative Engine responses using a black-box optimization framework to optimize and define visibility metrics. We facilitate systematic evaluation in this new paradigm by the introduction of GEO-bench, a benchmark of diverse user queries in various domains, along with the sources needed to answer those queries.”
Proven techniques. Nine optimization tactics were tested on 10,000 search queries for something that “looks a lot like BingChat design”:
Authorized: Content has been modified to be more persuasive while making authoritative claims.
Keyword Stuffing: Added more keywords to match the query.
Adding statistics: Quantitative statistics were added, rather than qualitative discussion.
Citation sources: Added relevant citations.
Adding quotes: Citations from credible sources were added.
Easy to understand: Language simplified.
Fluency optimization: Fluency has been improved.
Unique words: Added to content where possible.
Technical conditions: Added to content where possible.
The search query dataset was compiled from Google, Microsoft Bing, Perplexity.AI Discover, GPT-4 and other sources.
Theme specific optimization. The report said:
“Overall, our analysis suggests that website owners should strive to make domain-specific adjustments to their websites for increased visibility.”
For example, adding citations increased the visibility of Facts, while focusing on authoritative optimizations improved performance in the Discussion and History categories.
To be clear, when the document talks about “domains” it’s talking more about broad categories, not an online domain name. This would also be true in SEO – specific optimizations are different in healthcare and payday loans.
Among the “domains” mentioned in the document:
Business Debate Explanation Facts History Opinion People and Society Law and Government Science Statement
Level the playing field? According to researchers, GEO could help smaller websites rank lower in SERPs:
“Interestingly, websites that rank lower in SERPs, which typically struggle to gain visibility, benefit significantly more from GEO than those that rank higher. … For example, the Cite Sources method led to a substantial increase in 115.1% of the visibility of websites ranked fifth in SERP, while on average the visibility of the highest ranked website decreased by 30.3%.
Why we care With the advent of Google’s generative search experience, Bing Copilot (formerly Bing Chat), and other AI-powered search engines, now is a crucial time to test and learn what helps your content gain visibility. Because things that work in SEO won’t necessarily work in the new world of GEO.
But. While this paper is an interesting read, these are not real-world results (the researchers tested a subset of the results using Perplexity, but Perplexity is not Google). Following the document’s framework will not guarantee success or increased visibility in the Google AI experience. However, testing is highly recommended.
Learn more about LLM optimization. Search Engine Land contributor Olaf Kopp recently addressed the topic of generative AI optimization in LLM Optimization: Can You Influence Generative AI Results?
the paper You can download it here.
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