Structural Feature Engineering for Generative Engine Optimization: How Content Structure Shapes Citation Behavior

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.

The landscape of search has changed drastically with how people look for information online. Traditional search engines are being replaced by Generative Search Engines (GSEs), which use Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate natural language responses to user queries. For content creators, visibility is no longer solely determined by ranking in search results but by being cited within generated responses. But Generative Search Engines are black-boxes, leading to the emergence of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), a set of techniques aimed at improving content visibility in generative search settings. Most existing approaches rely on the explicit queries or query derived signals to align content to better suit user needs. We propose Query Implied Generative Engine Optimization (QI-GEO) to infers user intent directly from the document. Our approach approximates document's intent space and identifies content that may be missing yet relevant to answer potential user queries. Evaluation on GEO-Bench and Extended GEO-Bench demonstrated improvements across objective and subjective metrics. QI-GEO improved objective scores by up to 15.9% and subjective scores by up to 17.6%, while yielding nearly twice as many citation gains as citation losses. These results suggest that document-derived approximations of user intents can improve visibility without relying on explicit query inputs.

Generative search engines represent a transition from traditional ranking-based retrieval to Large Language Model (LLM)-based synthesis, transforming optimization goals from ranking prominence towards content inclusion. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), specifically, aims to maximize visibility and attribution in black-box summarized outputs by strategically manipulating source content. However, existing methods rely on static heuristics, single-prompt optimization, or engine preference rule distillation that is prone to overfitting. They cannot flexibly adapt to diverse content or the changing behaviors of generative engines. Moreover, effectively optimizing these strategies requires an impractical amount of interaction feedback from the engines. To address these challenges, we propose AgenticGEO, a self-evolving agentic framework formulating optimization as a content-conditioned control problem, which enhances intrinsic content quality to robustly adapt to the unpredictable behaviors of black-box engines. Unlike fixed-strategy methods, AgenticGEO employs a MAP-Elites archive to evolve diverse, compositional strategies. To mitigate interaction costs, we introduce a Co-Evolving Critic, a lightweight surrogate that approximates engine feedback for content-specific strategy selection and refinement, efficiently guiding both evolutionary search and inference-time planning. Through extensive in-domain and cross-domain experiments on two representative engines, AgenticGEO achieves state-of-the-art performance and demonstrates robust transferability, outperforming 14 baselines across 3 datasets. Our code and model are available at: https://github.com/AIcling/agentic_geo.