If your buyers are asking AI engines for recommendations, and they are, then being absent from those answers is a silent leak in your pipeline. This guide takes you from the basics to your first citations, one chapter at a time.
1. What GEO actually means
Search used to end in a list of links. Increasingly it ends in a written answer with a handful of sources. GEO is the practice of making sure your brand is one of those sources. It sits alongside SEO, not instead of it.
2. How engines choose sources
When an engine answers, it retrieves a small set of pages it trusts, summarizes them, and links them. Being retrieved depends on being reachable, structured, and credible. Being cited depends on being the clearest, most quotable source.
3. The three things to fix first
Start with machine access: make sure AI crawlers can reach your pages, publish an llms.txt, and add valid schema. Then structure: lead pages with direct, extractable answers. Then authority: earn corroboration from sources engines already trust. Most teams over-invest in the first and ignore the third.
4. Measuring and improving
Pick the ten prompts that matter to your pipeline and check who gets cited today. Ship the comparison content behind them, then re-measure in thirty days. Track mention rate weekly and tie it to pipeline, not vanity metrics.
See where you are cited today
A free snapshot audit of your rankings and AI citations before we ever talk.
Tyler leads work at the intersection of SEO and generative engines at Something Inc., helping B2B brands get ranked and cited across every major AI engine.