Diagnosing and Repairing Citation Failures in Generative Engine Optimization

Generative answer engines expose content through selective citation rather than ranked retrieval, fundamentally altering how visibility is determined. This shift calls for new optimization methods beyond traditional search engine optimization. Existing generative engine optimization (GEO) approaches primarily rely on token-level text rewriting, offering limited interpretability and weak control over the trade-off between citation visibility and content quality. We propose FeatGEO, a feature-level, multi-objective optimization framework that abstracts webpages into interpretable structural, content, and linguistic properties. Instead of directly editing text, FeatGEO optimizes over this feature space and uses a language model to realize feature configurations into natural language, decoupling high-level optimization from surface-level generation. Experiments on GEO-Bench across three generative engines demonstrate that FeatGEO consistently improves citation visibility while maintaining or improving content quality, substantially outperforming token-level baselines. Further analyses show that citation behavior is more strongly influenced by document-level content properties than by isolated lexical edits, and that the learned feature configurations generalize across language models of different scales.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) modifies web content to increase its likelihood of being selected and cited by generative search engines. This can give strategically optimized pages visibility disproportionate to their authority or relevance and even make weak or false information appear well supported. Unlike conventional search, generative search synthesizes information into direct answers rather than presenting competing sources, which can further amplify these risks, as assessing source provenance and authority requires additional user interaction. Despite these concerns, systematic methods for detecting GEO-optimized webpages remain underexplored. We introduce GEOFlagBench, a benchmark of 3,200 web content instances spanning 400 queries, four domains, and eight GEO optimizer families, and use it to systematically evaluate existing GEO detection methods. Although the strongest baseline achieves an aggregate F1 of 0.880, method-level and authorship-conditioned evaluations reveal substantial weaknesses and potential reliance on authorship-related shortcuts. We therefore propose Intervention-Paired Training (IPT), which supervises detector responses to GEO interventions and non-GEO AI polishing; on ModernBERT, IPT improves F1 from 0.862 to 0.944 and worst-group accuracy from 0.725 to 0.883. We develop a GEO-gated Agent system for auditing the Source Tier and verifiability of Citation URLs in detected GEO pages. Finally, we deploy the complete pipeline on released Google Search and Gemini-grounded retrieval results for 1,000 real-user queries. Across 10,095 available pages, we estimate an overall GEO prevalence of 8.90%, reaching 16.36% among pages modified in 2026. Our results establish a foundation for systematically detecting, auditing, and measuring GEO in real-world search ecosystems.

Generative engines (GEs) are reshaping information access by replacing ranked links with citation-grounded answers, yet current Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) methods optimize each instance in isolation, unable to accumulate or transfer effective strategies across tasks and engines. We reframe GEO as a strategy learning problem and propose MAGEO, a multi-agent framework in which coordinated planning, editing, and fidelity-aware evaluation serve as the execution layer, while validated editing patterns are progressively distilled into reusable, engine-specific optimization skills. To enable controlled assessment, we introduce a Twin Branch Evaluation Protocol for causal attribution of content edits and DSV-CF, a dual-axis metric that unifies semantic visibility with attribution accuracy. We further release MSME-GEO-Bench, a multi-scenario, multi-engine benchmark grounded in real-world queries. Experiments on three mainstream engines show that MAGEO substantially outperforms heuristic baselines in both visibility and citation fidelity, with ablations confirming that engine-specific preference modeling and strategy reuse are central to these gains, suggesting a scalable learning-driven paradigm for trustworthy GEO. Code is available at https://github.com/Wu-beining/MAGEO