IntentGEO: Intent-aware Generative Engine Optimization for Recommendation

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly shape recommendations across chatbots, e-commerce, and user-generated content (UGC) platforms, creating demand for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to improve item visibility in generated responses. Existing GEO studies are mainly content-centric, optimizing visibility under general-purpose queries. However, a shared item description usually serves users with different needs and decision goals, resulting in its visibility gains being dependent on the request. To investigate how changing intent affects visibility, we formulate IntentGEO to evaluate shared rewrites across need specificity and decision progression. We revisit existing GEO methods and find that their visibility gains vary across user intents. More critically, learning-based prompt optimization can underperform its handwritten seed on average. Tracing these updates reveals prompt drift from explicit recommendation instructions toward generic promotional tactics. To address this drift, we propose AMO (Anchored Meta-Optimization), which preserves recommendation instructions in a fixed core while learning appended strategies from citation feedback. Across four domains and ten intent states, AMO improves average citation-rank gain by 35% over the strongest prior learning-based baseline and leads on nine states. Ablations show that learned additions improve on the fixed core alone and that AMO outperforms full-prompt optimization initialized from that core. It also achieves the highest gains in an agentic recommendation pipeline and, after separate adaptation, on Doubao, a commercially deployed, closed-source online assistant. These findings highlight user intent as a key dimension of GEO evaluation and support anchored adaptation across recommendation needs and decision stages.