Guides & GEO basics
Generative Engine Optimization is about being present, accurate, and citable inside AI answers rather than ranking on a results page. The mechanics overlap with SEO, but the target is different enough to change your priorities.
How it works
- 1
GEO versus SEO
SEO optimizes a ranked list of links; GEO optimizes a synthesized answer. The technical hygiene is shared — speed, structured data, clean HTML — but GEO adds crawler access for AI agents, answer-first content, and citation authority.
- 2
Access comes before everything
A model cannot cite a page it cannot fetch. Before any content work, confirm GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest are allowed in robots.txt and not caught by your CDN's bot rules.
- 3
Write to be quoted
Models lift self-contained, factual statements. Short answer-first paragraphs, explicit comparisons, named entities, and dates get extracted; vague marketing copy does not.
- 4
llms.txt and structured data
Schema.org markup and an llms.txt file make your content easier to parse and attribute. They aren't ranking factors — they reduce the chance of being misread or skipped.
- 5
Measure over weeks
Because answers vary from run to run, judge GEO work on trends across several runs rather than on any single result.
Common problems
The failure modes we actually see, what causes them, and the fix.
Nothing changed after a week
- Cause
- Models re-index on their own schedule, and some answers are served from cached or grounded search results rather than a fresh crawl.
- Fix
- Technical access fixes can show up within one to two weeks; content changes typically take two to four. Full trends settle over 30 to 90 days.
A competitor appears for prompts about us
- Cause
- Comparative prompts naturally surface alternatives, and the model may simply have stronger third-party sources for them than for you.
- Fix
- Open the citations panel to see which sources it trusted for that answer, then work on being present and accurate in those sources.
The model states something wrong about us
- Cause
- Outdated pages, third-party summaries, or content thin enough that the model filled in the gaps itself.
- Fix
- Publish a clear, current, factual page on the topic and make sure it's crawlable. Correcting the source material is the only durable fix — there is no setting to edit a model's answer.
Can you guarantee first position?
- Cause
- AI answers are non-deterministic and unranked, so there is no stable “position one” to earn or buy.
- Fix
- Track mention rate, sentiment, and share of voice over time instead. Those move predictably with the work; a single answer does not.