What is GEO?
GEO is generative engine optimization, which means to optimize a brand and website for AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc., so that a brand is cited more often and with more accuracy in answers to user prompts.
SEO (search engine optimization) is relatively similar, with the target being ranking pages in search engines like Google and Bing.
Fundamentally, GEO and SEO overlap quite a bit. In fact, according to a survey of 130 Google search experts, “organic search ranking” was one of the top factors in appearing in Google AI answers, meaning brands that rank well in traditional search are typically sourced more often.
Other top GEO factors include:
- Whether bots, crawlers, and agents can access your page
- Whether your content answers the question being asked
- How well the brand/person/entity is already known
- Whether facts/stats/evidence are present in the content
- How well the site/page ranks for related queries
- Whether content includes original information
- Whether your stats/evidence is backed up by 3rd-party sources
- Whether your brand/person is trustworthy and reputable
- Whether your content is easy to fetch and extract
- Whether the answer to the question is placed near the beginning of the page
Now, as a quick refresher, let’s go over a few long-established SEO best practices:
- Whether bots and crawlers can access your page
- Whether your content aligns with user intent
- How well the brand/person/entity is known
- Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?
- Whether your stats/evidence is backed up by 3rd-party sources
- Whether your brand/person is trustworthy and reputable
- Whether your content is easy to fetch and extract
- Whether the answer to the question is placed near the beginning of the page
As you can see, there is significant overlap between GEO and SEO tactics. For both AI search and traditional search, what matters is: can their bots access your content, is your brand/product known, and is your content worth citing?
Optimizing Your Site & Content
In all honesty, in the world of AI search and GEO, your website isn’t as important as it is with SEO. LLMs don’t need your content or your site to reference your brand, and it’s becoming more and more clear that they really don’t want to link to your site and send you traffic (“WebFX: “ChatGPT Sources Less Visible”). Your website is still important, though, in the same way that Woody is still important to the Toy Story movies even though they keep pretending he’s leaving.
As mentioned above, there is a ton of overlap between GEO and SEO tactics. GEO isn’t rewriting the book; it’s basically shining a light on best practices most people didn’t care to talk about before.
Why are these things being talked about so much now? So “experts” can sell overpriced tools. So “experts” can sell overpriced services. So “experts” can make a name for themselves. Because some things have legitimately changed forever and people are scared.
Anyway, here’s a breakdown of a few things that need to be approached differently for AI search compared to SEO
Are your pages accessible?
Crawlers and fetch agents must load the page before anything else happens. Sites often fail here without realizing it due to edge rules from platforms like Cloudflare rejecting AI user agents, restrictive robots.txt directives, or content that relies heavily on JavaScript rendering. The bot landscape is highly segmented. OpenAI runs GPTBot for training data, OAI-SearchBot for the index behind ChatGPT search citations, and ChatGPT-User for live page fetches. You can block GPTBot to protect your data while allowing OAI-SearchBot to remain eligible for citations. But you probably don’t need to get that granular at all.
Bottom line: don’t block AI crawlers.
Tool: https://technicalseo.com/tools/ai-bot-access/
Are your pages ranking in traditional search?
LLMs ground their answers in different indexes. Gemini and Google AI Overviews pull from Google, meaning traditional SEO carries straight over. ChatGPT relies on Bing, though OpenAI now blends its own crawler data, so treat Bing as the check for ChatGPT visibility. Just remember that Bing ranking position only loosely predicts ChatGPT citations due to a reranking step. Claude web search draws on the Brave index. Being indexed matters much more than ranking first.
Are you covering a topic well (query fan-outs)?
LLMs and AI Assistants don’t run your prompt as a single query. Instead, they expand it into related sub-queries, search each one, and stitch the results together. That’s all done in the snap of your fingers. Your content needs to cover the sub-questions a prompt follows. Pages answering a tight cluster of related questions are cited in more of those branches than pages targeting a single, specific topic.
If you go into your LLM of choice right now and input a prompt, you’ll likely see that the AI is trying to predict what your second, third, and fourth prompts are going to be so that it can provide you with as helpful a response as possible. As a site owner, if you have the answers to be used for that full response, your likelihood of being cited is higher.
Tool: https://fanoutfox.com/
Is your content structured properly?
Getting fetched and indexed only gets you consideration. The model still has to lift a clean answer off the page. Put the answer near the top instead of burying it under windup copy. Use headers mapped directly to the questions people actually ask. Make specific claims that stand on their own. A handful of focused pages extract far better than one massive page covering everything an inch deep.
Optimizing Your Brand
In the era of AI search, brand and product marketing have even more crucial roles than they had already. Same as with SEO, success in GEO for a brand comes from how well-known your brand is. Being the most famous company or person or product in your industry can more than make up for having a terrible website with crappy content.
If you’re an ecommerce brand, think about Amazon and how often they outrank your pages. Your site likely is more optimized than Amazon’s and (hopefully) isn’t filled with spammy product listings, but your brand also probably isn’t a household name with the power to destroy lives. Buy local and support small businesses.
You can’t become a global name overnight. But you can start to build up your digital brand presence and start to optimize how you’re appearing in AI answers to ensure there isn’t a gap between your brand attributes and your brand associations.
Attributes are how you want to be represented, including what you do, who you serve, and what you are known for. Associations are how AI represents you.
This gap usually shows up as a flat factual error or a subtle framing issue. A company might do roofing, windows, and siding, but AI headlines them as just a roofing company. They install roofing so it is technically true, but it isn’t how they want to be known.
You close these gaps through consistency and authority.
- Make your information identical everywhere it appears online. When a client changes pricing or wins an award, every surface needs to reflect it. If your site says roofing but directory listings and old press releases lead with gutters, AI will say gutters because the weight of evidence points there.
- Combine that consistency with authority by earning mentions the field actually talks about. Produce content AI can source to answer buyer questions.
Along with accuracy, you’ll also want to keep an eye on your placement in AI answers. You can be described perfectly but still miss the list when someone asks, “what are the top roofing companies in Kansas City”, for example. This is starting to feel a bit like SEO. However, placements in AI answers are much, much more erratic. Answers will differ based on models, users, geolocations, word variations in the prompt, conversation history, etc.
Coming up next
Now that you know the basics of GEO, we will dive in a little deeper as we move forward through this series. Here’s what you can expect next:
- How to define your brand for AI search
- How to create a prompt framework
- How to audit your AI search presence
- How to optimize your site for AI (checklist)
- How to optimize your content for AI (checklist)
- How to measure your GEO performance
- How to contact Zach to do all this for me
