GEO & AI search glossary
Generative engine
What is a generative engine?
An AI system that answers a question by writing new text rather than returning a list of links — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI are the six we optimize for.
A generative engine retrieves source material, then composes an original answer from it. Because the output is prose rather than a ranked list, there is no position two — the brands named in the paragraph are the entire result set the user sees.
The six engines MyFast.ai targets are the ones buyers talk to directly and ask for recommendations: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI. Each has its own retrieval stack and its own crawler, which is why GEO work covers robots.txt access for all of them rather than optimizing for one.
Related terms
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)The practice of shaping a brand's content and its footprint across the web so that generative AI assistants name and recommend that brand when they write an answer. Unlike SEO, the goal is not a ranked link — it is being the business the model mentions.
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)The technique behind most AI search: before answering, the system retrieves relevant documents and writes its answer from them. GEO exists because the retrieval step decides which brands even get a chance to be mentioned.
- AI crawlerA bot operated by an AI company that fetches web pages for training or for live retrieval — GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot and others. Blocking them in robots.txt removes you from the answers they generate.
- AI OverviewGoogle's AI-written summary that appears above the traditional results. It draws on a mix of web pages and community sources, and it is one of the surfaces GEO work targets.
Want AI engines naming your business?
GEO by MyFast.ai does the work for you — GEO-optimized articles published to your own domain, forum swipe files, and monthly visibility scanning across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI. $1,499/month, no contract.