Beyond Retrieval: Modeling Confidence Decay and Deterministic Agentic Platforms in Generative Engine Optimization

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.

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

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) lets content owners rewrite web content to increase their visibility in generative systems. In recommendation agents, this creates a risk that seller-controlled sources make flawed products appear better supported than they are. We study this risk by asking whether recommendation agents preserve utility-aligned decisions when seller-controlled sources are rewritten for GEO. To make this question measurable, we construct SafeGEO, an evaluation suite with 22 GEO attack variants across 600 recommendation cases. We empirically show that GEO attacks can promote flawed target products. On average, they increase the rate at which such flawed products enter the recommendation set by up to 83.2%. We further study whether agent-side design choices can mitigate this risk and show that simple defenses, including defensive prompting and structured evidence checks, reduce harmful target promotion by up to 39.2%. These gains are substantial but do not restore the no-GEO performance, showing that GEO remains a serious risk despite developer-side mitigation.