To explore research progress of land use optimization based on genetic algorithm, we took 164 English and 27 Chinese papers on genetic algorithms and land use in the Web of Science database from 1999 to 2022 (as of January 22, 2022) as the data source. Based on bibliometric methods, we analyzed the time distribution of literature publications from 1999 to 2022, countries of published papers, the categories of published Chinese and English papers, and the journals of published papers. Moreover, the author cooperation, institute cooperation keyword coexist network and the literature co-citation network was visualized and research hotspots are explored. The study found that (1) judging from the number of papers published each year, the research on land use optimization based on genetic algorithm was rising as a whole. The whole development can be divided into three stages: 1999—2006, 2007—2015, and 2016 to the present. During the different stages, the number of published papers in English had increased significantly, while the number of papers in Chinese had been relatively stable. (2) Judging from the countries of published literature, China, the United States, and Iran were the top three in the world in terms of the number of published papers, and the top 10 countries in terms of the number of published papers were all located in regions with relatively high economic level. (3) The land use optimization research based on genetic algorithm belonged to the interdisciplinary field of environmental science, geography and planning. (4) From the perspective of authors of the papers, the current research was mainly conducted in small or medium-sized teams of less than 10 people, and there were only two large-sized team. Among them, the team with Bo Huang as the core was in a leading position in the domain. From the perspective of research institutions, three research groups had been formed in East Asia, the Middle East and North America , and they cooperated with each other, forming a huge cooperation network. (5) An important research area of land use optimization based on genetic algorithm was green infrastructure. The commonly used modeling method was multi-objective optimization model, which is compared and combined with particle swarm optimization. (6) The hot research areas of land use optimization based on genetic algorithm were southern China and the county scale. Key research directions included transportation planning, wind energy planning, biodiversity, nature conversation, lid planning and planning support system. Research methods included constrained multi-objective optimization and spatially explicit optimization.