Try this right now: ask ChatGPT who a good provider in your industry and city is. If your company does not show up, you just found your 2026 visibility problem. Every month, more B2B buying decisions start in an AI chat instead of a Google search — and there, the winner is not whoever has more backlinks. It is whoever the AI can cite.
That is what GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is about. It does not replace SEO: it is the layer that decides whether ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews mention you when someone asks about what you sell. These are the 7 steps we apply, in order of impact.
1. Structure content as question and answer
Models cite passages that answer a complete question in a few lines. Turn your H2 headings into real customer questions — how much it costs, how it compares, when it makes sense — and answer directly in the first two lines of each section. The warm-up intro Google tolerated, an LLM discards as a citation candidate.
2. Publish first-party data nobody else has
AIs cite sources with specific numbers. A post saying 60% of your clients came through referrals, with context on how you measured it, is citable material. Customer surveys, local industry benchmarks, reference pricing: any primary data turns you into a source instead of an echo.
3. Get your structured data in order
Organization schema with consistent name, address and industry, Article on every post, FAQPage where it applies. This is not magic: it is making it cheap for the machine to understand who you are. Add a real about page with actual names, history and clients — models assess whether your company looks like a real entity before citing it.
4. Get mentioned outside your own site
Models learn from what they read: industry press, serious directories, Reddit, specialized forums, YouTube. One contextual mention in a trade publication is worth more for GEO than ten filler backlinks. If your brand only exists on your own domain, to an AI you are a rumor.
5. Write honest comparisons
Ask any AI which tool to pick and watch it cite comparison articles. Write the comparison your customer is already making — you versus the alternative, with real pros and cons, including when you are NOT the right choice. Honesty is not just ethics: it is what makes the model trust the text.
6. Consolidate your digital entity
Same company name everywhere, active LinkedIn, Google reviews with responses, consistent directory profiles. Models triangulate: if your site says one thing, your LinkedIn another, and there are no reviews, the signal is weak and they cite someone else. Boring, but it underpins everything above.
7. Measure your AI presence — monthly
- Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini about your category and city, with different phrasings, and log whether you appear and how you are described.
- In GA4, build a segment for referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com. Still small, but it is the indicator that will grow.
- When you show up described incorrectly, fix it at the source: the model is almost always repeating something outdated from your own site.
Where to start this week
Do not attempt all 7 at once. Start with step 1 on your 5 most-visited pages and step 7 to establish a baseline. What I see across clients is that 60 to 90 days after fixing structure and entity signals, AI answer mentions start appearing. SEO took just as long — the difference is that today almost none of your competitors are doing this.
Want to know how AIs describe your company today? Reach out and we will run a GEO diagnosis — it is the initial snapshot, no strings attached.
