SAGEO Arena: A Realistic Environment for Evaluating Search-Augmented Generative Engine Optimization

TL;DR

This paper introduces SAGEO Arena, a comprehensive environment for evaluating search-augmented generative engine optimization, addressing current gaps by incorporating realistic web document structures and full pipeline analysis.

Contribution

We develop SAGEO Arena, a realistic benchmark environment that enables stage-level analysis of SAGEO, integrating structural web data and full search pipelines for better evaluation.

Findings

Existing approaches are often impractical in realistic settings.

Structural information improves SAGEO effectiveness.

Tailoring optimization to each pipeline stage is essential.

Abstract

Search-Augmented Generative Engines (SAGE) have emerged as a new paradigm for information access, bridging web-scale retrieval with generative capabilities to deliver synthesized answers. This shift has fundamentally reshaped how web content gains exposure online, giving rise to Search-Augmented Generative Engine Optimization (SAGEO), the practice of optimizing web documents to improve their visibility in AI-generated responses. Despite growing interest, no evaluation environment currently supports comprehensive investigation of SAGEO. Specifically, existing benchmarks lack end-to-end visibility evaluation of optimization strategies, operating on pre-determined candidate documents that abstract away retrieval and reranking preceding generation. Moreover, existing benchmarks discard structural information (e.g., schema markup) present in real web documents, overlooking the rich signals that search systems actively leverage in practice. Motivated by these gaps, we introduce SAGEO Arena, a realistic and reproducible environment for stage-level SAGEO analysis. Our objective is to jointly target search-oriented optimization (SEO) and generation-centric optimization (GEO). To achieve this, we integrate a full generative search pipeline over a large-scale corpus of web documents with rich structural information. Our findings reveal that existing approaches remain largely impractical under realistic conditions and often degrade performance in retrieval and reranking. We also find that structural information helps mitigate these limitations, and that effective SAGEO requires tailoring optimization to each pipeline stage. Overall, our benchmark paves the way for realistic SAGEO evaluation and optimization beyond simplified settings.