GEF is the measurable degree to which a page or brand can be accessed, understood, trusted, and cited by generative engines when composing their answers — quantified 0–100 by the GEF Score.
Twenty years ago, “Search Engine Friendly” was the line separating the websites Google could read from the ones it ignored. The engine has changed — now it's generative. The new dividing line is whether your content is Generative Engine Friendly: whether it can be accessed, understood, trusted, and cited when an AI composes its answer. Until now, nobody measured it. The GEF Score does.
Generative Engine Friendly (GEF) is the measurable degree to which a page or brand can be accessed, understood, trusted, and cited by generative engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity — when composing their answers.
Where SEO produced search-engine-friendly pages to rank, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) produces generative-engine-friendly pages to be cited. GEF quantifies that state on a 0–100 scale — the GEF Score — across four dimensions: Accessibility, Extractability, Authority, and Citability. GEF is the most direct on-page lever on AI Visibility (citation rate).
The first two ask can the engine use you; the last two ask will it choose and trust you. Each dimension is scored from the 16 pre-registered on-page signals.
The engine can reach and parse the page: AI-bot access (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot), HTTPS, server-rendered or static HTML, valid JSON-LD, correct canonical, sane robots.
Content is structured for atomic extraction: a direct-answer paragraph early, a regular heading cadence, appropriate length and reading level — passages a model can lift whole.
E-E-A-T plus verifiable author and entity identity: byline markup, sameAs entity links, freshness, internal link importance — reasons for the engine to trust the source it is about to quote.
The page carries citable units — FAQ / HowTo structured data, definitions, statistics, named entities — ready to be lifted into an answer.
The 16 registered signals populate the dimensions unevenly — Citability currently rests on a single registered signal (S5). This is by design: the v1 instrument is technical and structural, and richer citability signals (statistic density, definition blocks, named-entity coverage) are candidates for the v2 instrument. Off-page Academic Repository Presence is exploratory and is not part of the core GEF Score.
Each dimension is scored from the page alone, using the 16 pre-registered on-page signals (OSF: 10.17605/OSF.IO/XCG7J). Each signal scores on the registered 0 / 0.5 / 1 rubric; the dimension is their registered-weighted average, and the four combine by weight:
base_d = 100 × Σ(ωᵢ · gᵢ) / Σ(ωᵢ) # gᵢ ∈ {0, 0.5, 1}; ωᵢ = registered weight
Sub_d = clamp(base_d, 0, 100)
GEF = (20·Sub_Acc + 30·Sub_Ext + 25·Sub_Auth + 25·Sub_Cit) / 100
× gate(Sub_Acc)
gate(Sub_Acc) = 1 if Sub_Acc ≥ 60
gate(Sub_Acc) = Sub_Acc / 60 if Sub_Acc < 60 # linear haircut
# hard floor: all four AI bots blocked AND no SSR/static HTML
# → GEF ≤ 25, status "GEF-blocked"See the methodology or the deliverables you receive.
Run a free audit to score how accessible, extractable, authoritative, and citable your pages are to generative engines — and get a prioritized plan to raise the number.