What is GEO? Generative Engine Optimisation for Employer Brand Teams

Search engine optimisation assumes a user clicks a link. Generative engine optimisation assumes a user may never see one.

GEO is the practice of structuring content so that AI-powered answer engines, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude, retrieve and cite it when generating responses to user queries. It is distinct from traditional SEO, which optimises for ranking in a list of links. GEO optimises for inclusion in a synthesised answer.

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Key points

• GEO stands for generative engine optimisation: structuring content so AI answer engines retrieve and cite it in synthesised responses.
• AI Overviews now appear on roughly 18% of Google searches. When they do, the click-through rate to any website drops from around 15% to 8%, with only 1% of users clicking a source link inside the AI answer.
• For employer brand teams, GEO matters because candidates are beginning to research employers through AI tools. The AI's answer about your organisation is built from whatever is already publicly available about you.
• GEO for employer brand is not a separate technical discipline. It is a consequence of doing employer brand content, media relations, and review management well, with explicit attention to the signals AI engines use to evaluate authority and relevance.

What GEO is

The term was formalised in a 2024 paper by Aggarwal et al., presented at ACM SIGKDD, which found that conventional SEO techniques are largely ineffective for generative engines and that a specific set of GEO strategies can boost AI visibility by up to 40%.

Where SEO asks: how do we rank in a list of results?, GEO asks: how do we get included in the answer itself? The distinction matters because AI engines do not return a ranked list of sources for users to choose from. They synthesise an answer from multiple sources and cite a small number of them. Being ranked first in Google does not guarantee being cited in an AI response. Being cited in an AI response does not require ranking first in Google.

Why the search landscape is changing

AI-referred sessions jumped 527% year-over-year in the first five months of 2025, and the trend is accelerating. Google AI Overviews now appear on approximately 18% of all searches. When they do, users click through to any website only 8% of the time, compared to 15% without an AI Overview. Only 1% of users click a source link inside the AI summary itself, according to Pew Research Center analysis of nearly 69,000 Google searches from 900 US adults in March 2025.

For publishers, this is a traffic story. For employer brand teams, it is a reputation story. The question is not just whether fewer candidates click through to the careers site. It is whether the AI's summary of the organisation as an employer is accurate, complete, and positive.

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How AI engines build an employer summary

Roughly 11.6% of US workers surveyed by iHire in June 2025 said they had used AI tools to research employers before applying. Built In CEO Maria Christopoulos Katris, speaking at Talent Acquisition Week in February 2026, described the direction clearly: "Think of a world where, in five years, candidates start and stop their search in the LLMs."

For employer queries, AI tools typically draw from review platforms such as Glassdoor, Indeed, and Blind; news coverage; LinkedIn company pages and employee posts; the organisation's careers site and official blog; and media coverage of the organisation's practices, layoffs, culture, and leadership.

An organisation with a declining Glassdoor rating, a low review volume, or significant negative sentiment on recurring themes will find that AI tools reflect this. An organisation with consistent, positive, credible content across multiple authoritative sources will find that AI tools build a more favourable picture.

What GEO means in practice for employer brand teams

Katris offered a direct summary of what this requires: "If you haven't written a lot of positive, proactive content about your company in a controlled way on a third-party trust site, what you will see is that everything that shows up here is from reviews." And: "The brands that will be cited and mentioned the most are the ones that are consistently refreshing their content."

Translated into practical terms, GEO for employer brand involves placing employer brand stories in credible media outlets; ensuring leadership is quoted in reputable publications on relevant topics; maintaining updated profiles on LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed; producing employer brand content structured for AI extraction (clear answers to common questions, attributed data, expert quotes); and managing review health actively.

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Takeaways

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