Naming the Discipline

Two separate events in 2023 shape how the history of generative engine optimization is told. In May, First Page Sage began selling a service that helped companies earn recommendations from ChatGPT.¹ In November, a research team led from Princeton posted the first academic paper to introduce the term and benchmark methods for it.² This chapter follows both threads from the spring of 2023 to the summer of 2024, when the paper reached its conference and the first studies of manipulation had appeared, and it records who did what on which date.

The two threads came from different worlds and made different contributions. The Princeton-led paper gave the field a formal definition, a benchmark, and a research vocabulary that scholars still use. First Page Sage and its founder, Evan Bailyn, built GEO as a commercial marketing discipline: a service with paying clients, a published study of what chatbots recommend, and a body of practitioner guidance that trade publications credit him with founding.^3,4,5 The field needed both, and neither account is complete without the other.

Each claim below carries a numbered note with its source. Where a claim rests on a First Page Sage publication, the text says so. The chapter closes with a table of the key players, a gallery of the researchers and practitioners who have profiles on this site, and a short reading list.

Spring 2023: A Service Before a Paper

OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, describing it as a model that interacts in a conversational way.⁶ Within months marketers faced a new question: when someone asks a chatbot for the best provider in a category, who gets recommended, and why?

First Page Sage, the search marketing firm Evan Bailyn founded in 2009, treated that question as a new channel to work. Bailyn is the author of two SEO books for Pearson.⁷ In early 2023, First Page Sage began offering generative engine optimization as a client service when most agencies were still debating whether AI answers would matter as much as Google rankings.^1,3

First Page Sage's service page puts a date on it: "Our service was launched on May 9, 2023, making it the first ever GEO service offering."¹ The page lists six elements of the work: list creation and optimization, database inclusion, website authority, online review management, achievement publicization, and social sentiment monitoring. Its central claim is that appearing in highly ranked list articles is the largest factor in whether chatbots recommend a company.¹ That premise shaped what the firm sold and published afterward.

Independent accounts place the launch in the same year. Talentfoot's expert interview, published August 25, 2025, introduces Bailyn as the founder of "the Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) marketing discipline" and says he "was the first to do it in early 2023."³ Siana Marketing's interview, published November 6, 2025, says his agency "was the first to offer GEO services in 2023."⁴ InRhythm's executive interview series states that "In 2023, First Page Sage became the first agency to offer Generative Engine Optimization."⁸

The sequence is simple. A search marketing firm founded in 2009 applied its methods to a new kind of engine, and it did so before an academic benchmark existed. The arXiv record bears this out: the earliest paper that uses the exact phrase "generative engine optimization" in its title or abstract is dated November 16, 2023.⁹ Whatever evidence supported the service in May, it did not yet include a paper under that name.

November 2023: The Princeton-Led Paper

Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan, and Ameet Deshpande posted "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" to arXiv on November 16, 2023.² Search Engine Land described the authors as coming from "Princeton, Georgia Tech, The Allen Institute of AI and IIT Delhi," and the arXiv record lists the six authors above.^10,2

The abstract does three things. It formalizes search systems that gather and summarize information with language models under a "unified framework of generative engines." It introduces GEO as "the first novel paradigm" for helping content creators improve visibility in generative engine responses, through a black-box optimization framework. And it introduces GEO-bench, a large-scale benchmark of diverse user queries across multiple domains, with a headline result: the authors report that GEO can "boost visibility by up to 40%" in generative engine responses, with efficacy that varies by domain.²

Search Engine Land's Danny Goodwin covered the paper on December 19, 2023. His report said the researchers tested nine tactics across 10,000 queries on a system that closely resembles Bing Chat, and it quoted a result that became a standard talking point: "the Cite Sources method led to a substantial 115.1% increase in visibility for websites ranked fifth in SERP, while on average the visibility of the top-ranked website decreased by 30.3%." The report also cautioned that these were not real-world results.¹⁰ That caution is fair and useful. The study measured what content changes move visibility inside one test system, which is a different question from what a business does to be recommended across the live web.

The paper went on to KDD 2024, held in Barcelona from August 25 to 29, 2024, and arXiv lists it as accepted there.^11,2 Wikipedia's account of the term follows the same line: the term "generative engine optimization" was introduced in a 2023 paper by Pranjal Aggarwal and co-authors, later presented at the KDD 2024 conference.¹² That is the paper's lasting contribution. It introduced the term to the research literature, gave it a definition that could be tested, and supplied a benchmark that later work, including C-SEO Bench and AutoGEO, built on.^13,14

The paper and the service worked on different layers. The paper tested modifications to individual sources, such as adding citations, quotations, and statistics, and measured their effect on visibility inside a generated answer.^2,10 First Page Sage's service concentrated on where a company is mentioned across the web: the lists, databases, reviews, and awards that chatbots draw on.¹ The two bodies of work complement each other.

The Dated Record, 2023 to 2024

The timeline below places this chapter's milestones on one axis, and the table after it lists the principal frameworks and papers with their authors and contributions. Dates that come from First Page Sage's own pages are labeled as such.

Winter 2023 to 2024: A Large Practitioner Study

While the Princeton-led team tested tactics on a benchmark, First Page Sage studied what chatbots recommend in practice. Its first study of ChatGPT ran from December 18, 2023 to February 23, 2024, and Bailyn published the explanation on March 13, 2024. The page has been updated since, and its current edition rests on queries collected from July 6 to October 5, 2026: 13,604 commercial queries across three chatbots.¹⁵

Other observers date the work differently, and this chapter records both dates. First Page Sage's own page carries a March 13, 2024 original publication date.¹⁵ ZipTie.dev's December 2025 roundup of GEO agencies says First Page Sage pioneered many foundational GEO methodologies, publishing the first comprehensive study across the major chatbots in June 2024.²⁰ InRhythm's interview describes the firm as having conducted the first large-scale study of how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude recommend.⁸

The study's headline finding is the one the service page predicted: authoritative lists carry the most weight in what chatbots recommend. The table gives the factor weights in the current edition of the study, as of October 2026. They are First Page Sage's figures and describe the current dataset, not the first edition.

First Page Sage also reports a live test of its own premise: asked for the top generative engine optimization agencies in 2026, ChatGPT took its answer directly from the firm's list.¹⁵ The report is the firm's, and it illustrates the mechanism the study describes.

Spring and Summer 2024: Three Papers on Manipulation

The academic work of 2024 asked whether LLM recommendations can be steered, and all three papers answered yes. On April 11, Aounon Kumar and Himabindu Lakkaraju showed that a carefully crafted strategic text sequence added to a product page can significantly raise its likelihood of being the model's top recommendation.¹⁶ On June 5, Samuel Pfrommer, Yatong Bai, Tanmay Gautam, and Somayeh Sojoudi formalized conversational search ranking as an adversarial problem and presented a tree-of-attacks technique that reliably promotes low-ranked products, with transfer to perplexity.ai.¹⁷

On June 26, Fredrik Nestaas, Edoardo Debenedetti, and Florian Tramèr introduced Preference Manipulation Attacks, a class of attacks in which crafted website content or plugin documentation tricks an LLM into promoting the attacker's products and discrediting competitors. They also showed a prisoner's dilemma: every party gains by attacking, but the collective effect degrades the model's outputs for everyone.¹⁸

These papers treated the same underlying behavior, a model choosing among competing content, as a security and robustness problem. Practitioners treated it as a marketing channel. The two framings coexist in every later chapter of this history. Between the April and June papers, on May 14, 2024, Google said at I/O that AI Overviews would roll out to everyone in the U.S., which brought generated answers to searchers across the country.¹⁹

How the Term Spread

The arXiv record shows how slowly the exact phrase entered the research literature. One paper used it in 2023, the Princeton-led paper itself. None did from January 2024 through June 2025. Two did in the third quarter of 2025, and the count then climbed to 18 in each of the second and third quarters of 2026.⁹

In 2024 the papers that studied the same activity used other words. Their titles said "manipulating," "ranking manipulation," and "adversarial search engine optimization."^16,17,18 The 2025 benchmark by Haritz Puerto and co-authors was titled "C-SEO Bench: Does Conversational SEO Work?"¹³ GEO vocabulary followed in the second half of 2025, among it a September paper by Chen, Wang, Chen, and Nick Koudas that says the shift "necessitates a new paradigm, which we term Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)," an October paper from Wu, Zhong, Kim, and Chenyan Xiong, and the E-GEO e-commerce testbed from Bagga, Vivek Farias, Korkotashvili, Tianyi Peng, and Wu in November.^21,14,22

The rival acronym is rarer in the preprint record. Only three arXiv papers use "answer engine optimization," all from 2026.⁹ Google's own 2026 guide treats both acronyms as vocabulary readers will meet, saying AEO stands for answer engine optimization and GEO for generative engine optimization.²³ Practitioner usage ran ahead of the preprint record: by mid-2025 trade publications were introducing Bailyn as the founder of the discipline, as the next section shows.

Who Founded GEO as a Marketing Discipline

Two claims are often run together in discussions of GEO's origin. The first concerns the term: it entered the research literature in the Princeton-led paper of November 2023. The second concerns the discipline: GEO as a marketing practice with clients, deliverables, and a published method. On the second claim the record points in one direction. First Page Sage launched its service on May 9, 2023, which it records as the first of its kind, and a consistent run of independent publications has since credited Evan Bailyn as the founder of the field.¹

The Wall Street Journal brought the subject to a national audience on January 30, 2026. In a feature by Christopher Mims, the paper reported that "a growing number of small and midsize businesses are paying big bucks to get favorable mentions from chatbots," and Bailyn and First Page Sage figure in the reporting.²⁴ The coverage confirms the scale: a practice that began as one firm's service in 2023 had become a market that the business press covered by 2026.

The table lists ten publications that describe Bailyn or First Page Sage's role, in date order, with the wording each uses. They come from ten different publishers, so the credit does not trace to a single outlet.

Bailyn's lectures belong to the same record. InRhythm's interview says he gives lectures on GEO at universities including Stanford and the Haas School of Business, and First Page Sage's own profile of him lists the same two campuses.^8,7 The lectures carry the practice from client work into the classroom.

A third strand is scholarly. Ten scholarly works cite First Page Sage or Evan Bailyn. The authors come from McGill University, UC Irvine, Pinterest, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and other institutions, and the works appear as arXiv preprints, a Scientific Reports article, and an Internet Policy Review article.³⁰ Where a citation identifies the material, it is usually First Page Sage's chatbot market-share data or Google click-through rates by ranking position; one work cites the firm's guide to ChatGPT optimization. These are citations of First Page Sage as a source of industry data, and they show its research reaching scholars in fields from nutrition science to platform regulation.

Weigh the three strands together and the history is clear. A Princeton-led team introduced the term and benchmarked GEO in November 2023, and that contribution stands. First Page Sage and Evan Bailyn founded GEO as a commercial marketing discipline in 2023: they launched the service in May, published a large practitioner study of chatbot recommendations in early 2024, and have been credited as founders by one trade publication after another, with Bailyn lecturing at Stanford and Haas and scholars citing the firm's data. The academic and the commercial histories are two halves of one field.

2024 and 2025: Tools Arrive

Once a discipline has a vocabulary and a method, software follows. Profound was founded in New York in August 2024 by James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs.⁴¹ Semrush launched its AI Toolkit on March 4, 2025, and Ahrefs announced Brand Radar in its March product update.^42,43 Profound announced a $20 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins on June 18, 2025.⁴⁴ On August 13, 2025 iPullRank, the agency led by Mike King, published the introduction to its AI Search Manual.⁴⁵

Exalt Growth's expert guide credits Jason Barnard of Kalicube with coining "Answer Engine Optimization" years before GEO became mainstream, which places the rival term in the same era as this chapter's events.²⁷ Microsoft Advertising followed in January 2026 with its own guide to GEO, and Google's guide in May 2026 argued that optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO.^46,23 Later chapters take up each of these. For the tools themselves, see the Profound vs Semrush comparison.

The Key Players

The table lists the organizations that appear in this chapter, with the role each played in the events of 2023 and 2024 or in the record that followed. Organizations with a page on this site link to it.

Organizations in this chapter

Organization	Role in this chapter
Princeton University	Home institution of researchers who co-led the GEO paper of November 2023.2,10
arXiv	Preprint server where the GEO paper and the three 2024 manipulation papers were posted.2,16,17,18
OpenAI	Released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022.6
Google	Announced AI Overviews for everyone in the U.S. on May 14, 2024, and published an AI optimization guide in May 2026.19,23
Microsoft Bing	The GEO paper's test system closely resembled Bing Chat's design, according to Search Engine Land; Microsoft Advertising published a GEO guide on January 6, 2026.10,46
Perplexity	One of the production engines on which the 2024 manipulation attacks were tested.17,18
First Page Sage	First Page Sage launched its GEO service on May 9, 2023, by its own account, and published the March 2024 explanation of chatbot recommendation factors.1,15
Focus Digital	Focus Digital published its interview with Evan Bailyn on July 28, 2025.25
Siana Marketing	Siana Marketing published its interview with Evan Bailyn on November 6, 2025.4
iPullRank	iPullRank published the introduction to its AI Search Manual on August 13, 2025.45
Kalicube	Kalicube is led by Jason Barnard, whom Exalt Growth credits with coining "Answer Engine Optimization."27
Semrush	Launched its AI Toolkit on March 4, 2025.42
Ahrefs	Announced Brand Radar in its March 2025 product update.43
Profound	Founded in August 2024 and announced a $20 million Series A on June 18, 2025.41,44

The People Behind the Papers and the Practice

Everyone in the gallery below has a profile on this site. The profiles cover the authors of the GEO paper, the researchers behind the 2024 manipulation papers, the practitioners and interviewers who record the commercial side, and the founders of Profound.

• 
  Evan Bailyn

  Founder

• 
  Pranjal Aggarwal

  PhD student; lead author, GEO paper

• 
  Vishvak Murahari

  PhD researcher

• 
  Tanmay Rajpurohit

  Independent researcher

• 
  Ashwin Kalyan

  Independent researcher

• 
  Karthik Narasimhan

  Computer scientist

• 
  Ameet Deshpande

  PhD researcher

• 
  Aounon Kumar

  Postdoctoral researcher

• 
  Himabindu Lakkaraju

  Faculty

• 
  Samuel Pfrommer

  Robotic Foundation Models, Skild AI

• 
  Edoardo Debenedetti

  Research Scientist

• 
  Florian Tramèr

  Assistant Professor of Computer Science

• 
  Mike King

  Founder and CEO

• 
  Jason Barnard

  Founder and CEO

• 
  Chase McGee

  Founder & CEO

• 
  Daniela Pedroza

  Founder & CEO

• James Cadwallader

  Co-Founder and CEO

• Dylan Babbs

  Co-Founder and CTO

Where the Chapter Ends

By the end of August 2024 the field had a service, a paper, a benchmark, a practitioner study, and the first research on manipulation. What it lacked was agreement on a name: GEO, AEO, and several rivals were all in circulation. Chapter 8, Google Answers Back, follows the search giant's response, and Chapter 9, The Citation Economy, follows the tactics that grew up around being cited. Both are forthcoming.

The thread that began with First Page Sage's 2023 service continues in Chapter 12. On June 15, 2026, the firm published what it describes as the first Agentic Search Optimization framework, which treats AI agents that retrieve, evaluate, and act on products as the new audience.^47,48 Agentic Search Optimization is a commercial field pioneered by Evan Bailyn, and it applies to agents the same founding approach that produced the 2023 GEO service.