Bachelor's or master's thesis: GEO and AI search (m/f/d)

What it’s about

More and more people no longer ask a search engine – they ask an AI assistant. The answer then cites two or three sources, and if you’re not among them, you simply don’t exist. Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is meant to change that. The catch: how do you measure visibility in answers that are put together differently every time someone asks? That is exactly what we need a robust method for, and you can develop it in your thesis.

vona is a web agency from Leipzig that works remote-first and brings AI integration, web and app development, design and SEO & GEO together in one team. We give honest advice and agree before every project how success will be measured – which, for GEO, is precisely the hard part.

An example from our work: in the GEO optimization of an online store with more than 15,000 product pages, an n8n pipeline equipped the 800 most important pages with structured data and citable copy in three days. After eight weeks, the store was mentioned three times as often in Google AI Overviews, and traffic from AI-powered searches rose by 29%. One possible research question: which page features – structured data, text structure, freshness, evidence – demonstrably increase the likelihood of being cited in AI answers, and how stable are such measurements across time and models? Your own ideas, for instance about specific industries or individual assistants, are welcome.

Your tasks

• Develop a measurement approach based on a set of realistic search questions that you put to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews at regular intervals.
• Automate the queries and the analysis of the cited sources, for example with Python or n8n and the relevant APIs.
• Check how much results fluctuate from run to run, and work out how many measurements a reliable statement needs.
• Investigate which page changes, such as JSON-LD or clearly structured answers, go hand in hand with more mentions.
• Condense your results into metrics that companies without an SEO department can understand.

What you bring

• Studies in computer science, business informatics, media informatics, data science or online marketing with a technical focus
• Basic Python or JavaScript skills and no fear of APIs
• Some exposure to SEO, structured data or web analytics
• A basic grasp of statistics, so that measurements don’t turn into chance findings
• Good German, as we tailor the measurements to client projects in German-speaking countries

Nice to have, not a must: experience with Google Search Console, Schema.org or small websites of your own.

What we offer

• A young research field with data and questions from real client projects
• A dedicated contact at vona who supports you on the subject matter, plus regular check-ins; your university remains responsible for academic supervision
• Access to the AI tools for your measurement runs, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and n8n
• You organize your time around the semester, working hybrid – in Leipzig and from home
• If it goes well, there’s the possibility of continuing to work together after your thesis, for example on follow-up projects – a possibility, not a promise

How to apply

The form at the bottom of this page is the quickest way. Write a few sentences about yourself and what interests you about GEO, and add a link – your CV, GitHub, LinkedIn or a website of your own. No need for stock phrases in a cover letter. We usually get back to you within a week.