E-GEO: A Testbed for Generative Engine Optimization in E-Commerce

This research paper introduces E-GEO, the first benchmark dataset specifically created for studying Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) in e-commerce, a practice necessitated by the shift from traditional search to large language model (LLM) conversational agents. The E-GEO dataset includes over 7,000 realistic, multi-sentence consumer queries matched with product listings, providing a rich testing ground for improving product visibility. The researchers conducted a large-scale empirical comparison, finding that existing heuristic rewriting strategies were largely ineffective. By contrast, modeling GEO as a prompt-optimization problem and applying an iterative algorithm led to significant performance gains in product ranking. The study notably found that all optimized rewriting prompts converged on a similar set of features, providing strong evidence for a stable, universally effective GEO strategy that transcends specific ad hoc rules.