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GEO strategy·Intermediate·9 min

Get your brand cited in ChatGPT: a 30-day GEO playbook

When a buyer asks ChatGPT "what's the best tool for X?", the model recommends a handful of brands and the rest are invisible. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the set of strategies that improve brand visibility in AI search engines, and this is a practical 30-day loop for applying them: measure, fix the highest-impact gaps, and re-measure so the improvement is provable, not hopeful.

What you'll be able to do: A concrete, measurable plan to improve your brand visibility in AI search engines — and the evidence that it worked.

  1. 1

    Week 1 — Measure a baseline

    Run an AI-visibility scan across the engines your buyers use and note your Visibility %, Share of Voice and, crucially, your non-branded visibility (are you recommended when nobody names you?). This baseline is what you'll prove the lift against. Screenshot it — you'll compare in week 4.

  2. 2

    Week 1 — Run a GEO Audit

    Run the GEO Audit on your main site. It scores 0–100 across crawler access, server-rendered content, structured data and llms.txt, and hands back a prioritised fix list with the points each fix would recover. Start at the top: the highest-impact, lowest-effort fixes first.

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    Week 2 — Unblock the AI crawlers

    Confirm robots.txt allows the answer engines (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Googlebot, Google-Extended) and that a firewall/CDN isn't quietly blocking them — the audit's live reachability check catches edge blocks that robots.txt alone can't. If an AI crawler can't fetch your page, nothing else you do matters.

  4. 4

    Week 2 — Make content readable without JavaScript

    AI crawlers fetch raw HTML and don't run JavaScript. If your key pages are client-rendered, the model sees an empty shell. Server-render or pre-render the main content so the answer engine actually reads it. The audit's SSR checks tell you which pages are at risk.

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    Week 3 — Write to be quoted

    Peer-reviewed GEO research (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024) found the biggest citation lifts come from direct quotations, statistics backed by a named source, and citations to authoritative references — while keyword stuffing hurts. Add real, verifiable quotes and stats to your key pages; never fabricate them. The same goes off your site: reviews and mentions are earned. Don't buy them, don't fake them, and don't build sites that pose as independent while repeating your own claims. Then add FAQ and Article schema so the engine can parse the entities.

  6. 6

    Week 3 — Publish an llms.txt and clean your entity

    Add an /llms.txt that points AI assistants at your best pages, and make sure your Organization schema (name, url, logo, sameAs links to Wikipedia/LinkedIn) anchors your brand as a known entity. These are table stakes — they don't guarantee a mention, but getting them wrong quietly removes you from consideration.

  7. 7

    Week 4 — Re-measure and prove the lift

    Re-run the same scan on the same prompts and compare against your week-1 baseline. Watch non-branded visibility and Share of Voice, not just the headline. A note on timing: AI engines re-crawl on their own schedule, so a page you edited this week may not be reflected for a few days — if the number is flat right after publishing, re-measure in a day or two.

Frequently asked

It varies by engine and how often it re-crawls, but plan for days-to-weeks, not minutes. Technical fixes (crawlability, SSR) are read on the next crawl; content and authority signals compound more slowly. Re-measure on a schedule rather than expecting an instant jump.

They overlap on fundamentals — crawlable, well-structured, authoritative content — but the objective differs. SEO optimises for ranking in a list; GEO optimises for being recommended inside a single synthesised answer. Some tactics (quotable statements, cited statistics) matter far more for GEO, and keyword stuffing actively hurts.

For most sites it's making sure the AI crawlers can both reach the page (not blocked at robots.txt or the CDN) and read it (server-rendered content, not a JavaScript shell). No amount of great content helps if the engine never sees it. The GEO Audit ranks your specific fixes by recoverable points.

Measure a baseline before you change anything, make the fixes, then re-run the same prompts and show the movement in Visibility %, non-branded visibility and Share of Voice — each with its sample size. Pairing the GEO Audit score (readiness) with the visibility trend (results) tells the honest before-and-after story.
GEO Audit docs

Related playbooks

GEO strategyTurn an AI-visibility gap into a cited pageFind the prompts where AI recommends competitors but not you, generate an evidence-grounded content brief, publish the fix, and measure the lift.Getting startedRun your first AI visibility scanSet up a project, add the right prompts, and run your first scan to see how often AI engines mention your brand — with the sample size behind every number.ReportingFrom AI visibility scan to a white-label client reportBring AI search visibility into the same white-label client report as Google Ads, GA4 and Meta — drafted with AI, branded as yours, and delivered on a schedule.

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