Resources
Primary sources on GEO
The research paper that named the field, and what the AI engines themselves document about how sites appear in their answers.
- GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, arXiv (Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan, Deshpande). The paper introducing GEO reports that its optimization methods can raise a source's visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40%.
- AI Features and Your Website, Google Search Central. Google says there are no extra requirements or special optimizations to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode: a page only needs to be indexed and eligible for a snippet, with no guarantee of being shown.
- Overview of OpenAI Crawlers, OpenAI. OpenAI explains that OAI-SearchBot governs inclusion in ChatGPT search answers and GPTBot governs model-training crawling, each controlled independently in robots.txt, with search changes taking about 24 hours.
- Perplexity Crawlers, Perplexity. Perplexity says PerplexityBot surfaces and links sites in its search results (not for training foundation models) and should be allowed in robots.txt to appear, while the user-triggered Perplexity-User fetcher generally ignores robots.txt.
- Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview, Microsoft Bing (Bing Webmaster Blog). Bing's February 2026 announcement says Webmaster Tools now reports how often a site's pages are cited as sources in Microsoft Copilot, Bing AI summaries and select partner integrations, including grounding queries and per-page citation counts.
- Your content, your choice: clearer preferences for training and grounding, Microsoft Bing (Bing Search Blog). Bing's October 2026 post lets publishers set page-level grounding preferences (Allow by default, DisallowExtended for Microsoft-operated experiences like Copilot only, or Disallow) via meta tag or HTTP header, warning that Disallow sharply reduces visibility in AI answers.
Each link was checked November 2026. For the agencies, see the directory; for the tools, see tool or agency.