What is GEO?
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the discipline of making your brand visible inside AI-generated answers - the kind ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude increasingly hand back instead of a list of blue links.
Why it's not SEO
Traditional SEO optimized for a ranking. GEO optimizes for a citation. The unit of success is no longer "appears at position 3 in search results"; it's "is named in the answer paragraph the user actually reads." The signals that produce one rarely produce the other in equal measure - strong domain authority helps both, but structured data, entity coherence, and third-party authority matter disproportionately more for GEO.
How LLMs choose which brands to name
Four broad signals: (1) entity strength - does the model have a confident representation of who you are; (2) third-party authority - Wikipedia, analyst reports, mainstream press; (3) recency - has your category been freshly crawled by the model's tools; (4) structured data - schema.org markup, llms.txt, well-formed About pages.
The five priorities
- Audit your current visibility. Run a fixed prompt set across all four engines. Log every result. You can't fix what you can't see.
- Fix entity signals. Wikipedia, Wikidata, Organization JSON-LD - they must agree on who you are.
- Earn third-party citations. Mainstream press, analyst reports, well-cited Wikipedia pages adjacent to your category.
- Publish llms.txt. A simple link map at /llms.txt pointing AI crawlers at your highest-quality reference content.
- Measure weekly, iterate. Run the same baseline every Monday. Double down on what moves the score.
What "good" looks like
A confident GEO setup ships ~5 actions per week, sees a 10–15 point Visibility Score lift in the first 90 days, and finishes the first quarter cited on at least 3 of 5 major engines for its highest-intent buyer prompts.