· ~5 min
What GEO is: make pages readable and citable by AI
GEO asks whether generative answers treat your page as a citeable source—not only traditional rankings.
Search engine optimization cares about position on results pages. Generative engine optimization (GEO) asks something else: when ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, or Copilot build an answer, can they open your page, understand it, and choose to cite it.
Some systems honor robots.txt first; some fetch with their own crawler identity; some lean on structured data to confirm who the site is. If the page will not open, the body lives only in scripts, or the entity does not match, a pretty score still will not get you cited.
Overlaps SEO, but is not SEO
Titles, descriptions, canonicals, and sitemaps matter on both sides. GEO additionally watches three things: whether citation crawlers are explicitly allowed, whether the body has a paragraph that can stand alone as a quote, and whether the brand has a stable entity id. Classic authority metrics, link counts, and keyword density are not in this score.
One page per run
GEO Cool scores only the URL you submit. robots, sitemap, and llms.txt are read from the site root because that is where they live. A sitewide average never replaces this page.
Scores prioritize work; they do not replace reading
0–100 maps to four bands: 90+ excellent, 75–89 good, 50–74 pass, below 50 needs work. Unfixed P0 issues cap the total at 74 so small wins cannot average away a full crawl block. Fix blockers first, then polish content.