What is Generative Engine Optimization?

For twenty years, search engines returned a list of ten blue links. Your job, as a site owner, was to get into the top three. You optimized for keywords, backlinks, and page speed. You wrote content that ranked.

That phase of the internet is shifting.

AI Overviews now appear on a growing share of Google's results pages. ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Claude, and You.com all compose answers from web pages they have crawled and judged quotable. Exact numbers are moving targets and vary by vertical, but the direction is clear: for a growing share of queries, users get an answer, not a list of links.

What "being cited" actually means

Inside an AI-generated answer, your site can appear in three places:

1. Quoted directly — a sentence or two lifted from your page and attributed to you.
2. Paraphrased with citation — the answer uses your facts and links to you as a source.
3. Invisible — your page exists, but the model chose to quote someone else.

The first two produce referral traffic. The third produces nothing. And which category you land in is decided almost entirely by how readable your page is to the model.

The paper that coined the term

"Generative Engine Optimization" was introduced in a 2023 paper by researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI, and IIT Delhi. They benchmarked what changes in a web page move it from invisible to cited in generative answers.

Their finding, summarized: content-level edits like adding authoritative quotations, statistics, and citations measurably improved source visibility in generative answers, while keyword-density tactics borrowed from traditional SEO did essentially nothing. The largest effect sizes in their experiments approached 40%, though results varied by query type.

The signals that moved the needle, in order of impact: authoritative quotes, statistics, citations to source data, and clear declarative writing. Notably absent: keyword density, exact-match domains, meta keyword tags. Paper: "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" (Aggarwal et al., 2023).

Why this is a WordPress problem

WordPress powers roughly 43% of the web (W3Techs). Most WordPress sites have little structured data beyond whatever their theme happens to emit. Most have no llms.txt. Most have FAQ sections written as ordinary paragraphs instead of the core/details blocks that generate FAQPage schema. The plugins that dominate the SEO category — Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO — were all built for the blue-link era and have added AI-era features on top.

Dennis GEO is built the other way around: GEO-first, classic SEO as a subset. The plugin treats schema, llms.txt, and entity clarity as the primary product — not as a premium upsell.

What you should actually do

If you own a WordPress site and you care about being in AI answers over the next 24 months, the action list is short:

1. Add complete Organization or LocalBusiness schema with address, phone, and geo.
2. Add FAQ sections to your top 5 pages and mark them up as FAQPage schema.
3. Publish an llms.txt and llms-full.txt at your site root.
4. Rewrite your homepage and service pages so the first paragraph defines, specifically, what you do, where you do it, and for whom.
5. Submit the updated sitemap to Google Search Console.

You can do all of that by hand. Or you can install Dennis GEO and let the plugin handle the markup, the files, and the audit — while you do the content decisions only you can make.