What is generative engine optimisation (GEO)?

The headline number behind GEO is "up to 40%", and it tends to be repeated as if it were a promise. It comes from a research paper, and what it measures is how visible a source is inside an AI-written answer. Visits, enquiries and sales aren't in it.

Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the practice of shaping your content so that AI engines are more likely to use and cite it when they write an answer. It sits next to AEO and AI SEO as one of several labels for overlapping work, and it's the one that began life in a published experiment. That experiment is worth understanding before anyone sells you the label.

Where does the term GEO come from?

The name comes from a paper titled GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, by Aggarwal and colleagues, a team that includes researchers at Princeton University and IIT Delhi alongside independent authors. The work dates from 2023 and 2024: the paper was revised on 28 June 2024 and accepted to the KDD 2024 conference.

The authors defined a generative engine as a search system that writes an answer from several sources instead of returning a list of links. Their question was practical. If you change how a page is written, does the engine use it more?

What did the researchers test, and what did they find?

The researchers applied different edits to source content, ran a benchmark of 10,000 queries, and measured how much of each generated answer drew on a given source, giving more weight to material that appeared earlier. The paper calls that position-adjusted word count. It's a measure of presence in the answer and nothing wider.

Why isn't "up to 40%" a forecast?

Because "up to" means the best result across the tests, and "relative" means a share of what the source already had. Say a page accounts for 5% of an answer's weighting today. A 40% relative gain takes it to 7%, which is worth having and nowhere near a transformation.

Because it's a benchmark. The queries were the researchers' choice, run in 2023 and 2024 against engines that have changed since. The paper tells you which edits were worth testing first, not what your site will get.

And because visibility in an answer isn't a visit. Pew's browsing data for US adults, from March 2025, found a traditional search result was clicked in 8% of Google visits that showed an AI summary, against 15% of visits that didn't, although Google told The Register the study used a flawed method. No UAE equivalent could be found, so judge any GEO work by what happens to your own enquiries.

Does GEO matter for a business in the UAE?

Yes, in the sense that matters: generated answers are available to UAE searchers. Google's Search Help pages list the UAE as a place where AI Overviews and AI Mode are available, and both pages show Arabic as supported (viewed 7 November 2026). Your customers can meet a generated answer on the same results page where they used to meet your listing.

Availability isn't appearance, though. It doesn't mean every search shows an answer, and no count of how often one appears on UAE searches could be found. That's the reason to start with your own questions and your own pages rather than with a general fear.

What should a UAE business do with it?

Treat the paper as an editing brief, not a campaign. The edits that did best are ones a careful writer would make anyway: say where a fact comes from, put a real number where an adjective was, and quote a source properly.

• Name the source and the year in the same sentence as a statistic. Put a date next to prices and turnaround times too, so a stale one is easy to spot.
• Quote only people who've agreed to be named. An invented or unattributed quotation is worse than none.
• Swap adjectives for facts. "Fast delivery" says nothing, while a delivery window for each emirate says something.
• Leave keyword repetition alone. The paper found it didn't help, and Google's guide to its generative AI features says its scaled content abuse policy extends to attempts to manipulate AI responses in Search.
• Start with the handful of pages that earn revenue: services, pricing, and whatever page people read just before they message you on WhatsApp.

Be strict about the numbers. A statistic on a page that sells something works as an advertising claim, so every figure should be one you could prove.

The UAE government portal (updated September 2026) says suppliers who advertise misleading prices and false data on goods and services face up to two years' imprisonment and fines of up to AED 2 million, under Federal Law No. 15 of 2020 as amended in 2023. That's a ceiling, and this isn't legal advice, but a figure invented to please an AI engine is the shortcut to avoid.

If you'd rather see the sequence than the theory, GEO for UAE businesses sets out a first month, and measuring AI search visibility covers how to check whether any of it moved. Our SEO service covers this alongside the rest of search work.

If someone sells you GEO, ask what their number is measured on. "Visibility in generated answers, on a fixed list of prompts, repeated over time" is an honest answer. "Up to 40% more traffic" isn't, because the paper doesn't say that.