GEO

The distinction from AEO is worth holding onto. AEO asks whether an engine can pull your answer out of your page. GEO asks whether a system that is synthesizing an answer from several sources — most of them not yours — understands your product well enough to include it, and finds enough agreement elsewhere to repeat the claim. Extraction is about your page; synthesis is about the information environment around it.

The research is unusually concrete for a discipline this young: the original paper reports visibility gains of up to roughly 40% from source-level changes such as adding citations, quotations and statistics, and notes that effectiveness varies sharply by domain. Treat that as a benchmark result rather than a forecast for your site. The practitioner list is consistent with it — entity consistency, original data, expert commentary, clear product information, third-party corroboration.

The durable half is the half you do not own. What independent sources say about you is what a model cross-checks against, which is why claiming the profiles that resolve your entity and earning genuine mentions through SMO do more here than another page on your own domain. The launch plan works that order deliberately.