We all want “more AI visibility.” The lie is thinking you get it by tweaking keywords and hoping for citations.
The truth: GEO is an authority game played on machines’ terms — and authority is earned in public, structured in markup, and proven with facts.
1) Stop chasing keywords. Start declaring entities.
Keywords describe; entities decide. Map the people, products, places, frameworks, and proofs you want machines to know you for — and wire them together (schema + internal links). That’s how AI builds knowledge, not from your tag cloud.
2) Make your pages “chunkable,” not just readable.
AI doesn’t read pages; it extracts passages. Design every section as a self-contained, citable unit: descriptive H2/H3s, bullets, tables, Q&A and a 2–3 sentence “answer box” per subsection. Then you earn copy-paste weight.
3) Replace marketing claims with machine-checkable facts.
Trade “industry-leading” for numbers, ranges, SKUs, geos served, SLAs, certifications, counts, and timestamps. Machines privilege specifics over swagger. (Your copy gets stronger for humans, too.)
4) Court the communities AI actually trusts.
You can out-optimise your blog and still lose to one neutral sentence on Wikipedia or a high-signal Reddit thread. Do the unglamorous work: contribute facts, correct entries, answer questions. AI prizes community validation over brand puff.
5) Build “quote-magnets.”
Write lines designed to be quoted verbatim (short, factual, attribution-ready). Direct quotes carry the heaviest citation weight in AI answers. Seed them in reports, how-tos and FAQs.
Over a third of UK adults (42%) say they trust AI to produce accurate summaries of information.
BBC x Ipsos | Trusted News: Audience Use and Perceptions of AI Assistants for News
6) Publish in formats AI over-indexes on.
Longform hubs (2,000+ words) with current timestamps, yes. But also transcripts, chaptered videos, spec sheets, and data tables. Multimodal, structured assets raise inclusion odds across engines.
7) Optimize for the prompts that trigger AI, not just SERPs.
“How to…,” “What is…,” “Why/When/Where…,” troubleshooting, vs-comparisons. These prompt classes light up AI responses. Build content that answers the full conversational path, not a lonely keyword.
8) Engineer your schema like it’s an API for your brand.
Treat JSON-LD as your machine-readable press release: Article/FAQ/HowTo/Organization + sameAs to authoritative nodes. Validate ruthlessly; incomplete or messy markup wastes crawls.
9) Design a “co-citation” strategy.
Get named alongside category authorities in roundups, association sites, method pages, and glossaries. Co-occurrence in trusted lists is new-age PageRank for AI answers.
10) Move PR from vanity headlines to citation fuel.
Target outlets and formats that engines actually ground to. Association journals, data-driven posts, explainers with pull-quotes, not just “we raised money” PR. Ubiquity beats virality here.
11) Instrument for AI bot reality, not hope.
Track GPTBot, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot in Cloudflare/Semrush/Screaming Frog. Log who crawls what, and correlate with your “AI Answer Inclusion Rate” and “Citation Quality Score.” If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
12) Set GEO KPIs your board will care about.
Report inclusion rate across target prompts, share-of-voice in AI answers, primary-source share vs mentions, and conversions from AI referrals. Traffic is a lagging vanity metric; inclusion is the leading one.
13) Build “answer graphs,” not blog calendars.
Create topic clusters where every node answers a complete sub-question and links to its neighbours with explicit relationships. You’re constructing a private knowledge graph the public engines can lean on.
You’re constructing a private knowledge graph the public engines can lean on.
14) Ship “tools that get cited.”
Calculators, checkers, tables, and mini-datasets are catnip for AI synthesis. They get referenced, paraphrased, and quoted; and they travel. (Case studies show this changes inclusion trajectories in months, not years.)
15) Accept that GEO is a channel shift, not a channel add-on.
AI search visitors behave differently and, increasingly, outnumber classic organic. Your mix, measurement, and message must evolve accordingly or you’ll optimise yesterday while your buyer asks tomorrow.
The punchline
If SEO was “make Google like you,” GEO is “make machines use you.”
That requires facts over fluff, entities over adjectives, and community proof over corporate prose.
Read more about AI in Marketing.