If nobody can find you, nothing else matters. I learned that early, and it has held through every company I have built.
I grew The Alternative Ways to more than 1M monthly views through SEO. I have ranked #1 on Google worldwide for “blockchain consulting”, for “which digital assets to invest in”, and for the names of the companies I built. That traffic brought in clients, candidates and partners without a single ad.
Now the ground is shifting: more and more of your customers ask an AI assistant before they open a search engine. The answer they get either names you or it doesn’t. Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the work of making sure it does.
Is SEO dead?
No. GEO sits on top of good SEO, and AI assistants lean heavily on pages that search engines already trust, and they reward the same basics: clear pages, fast sites, honest content and real authority. If your SEO is weak, start there.
What changes is the unit of success: in search you win a ranking, and in an AI answer you win a citation, or a mention by name. That rewards pages that are easy for a machine to quote accurately.
Make your pages easy to read for machines
This is the technical layer. It is not glamorous, but it is where most sites lose. We built all of it into this site, so I can tell you what matters:
- Structured data. Add JSON-LD to every page: Organization, Person, Article, FAQ, Service, and breadcrumbs. It tells machines exactly who you are and what a page is about.
- An llms.txt file. A plain summary at the root of your site that points AI crawlers to your most important pages.
- Markdown mirrors. A clean Markdown version of each key page, without navigation, scripts or clutter. It is the easiest possible thing for a model to read.
- A welcoming robots.txt. Check that you are not blocking the AI crawlers you want to be cited by.
Write answers worth quoting
AI assistants quote short, self-contained answers, so write them. For every question your customers ask, give a direct answer of 40 to 60 words right under a heading phrased as that question. Then go deeper below it.
That paragraph should stand on its own: name the subject, give the answer and include one concrete fact. If someone copied only those 50 words, would they still be accurate and useful? That is the test.
Citation-worthy pages have something the model can’t get elsewhere. Original numbers, a clear definition, a step-by-step method or a real case study. A page that repeats what ten other pages say gives the model no reason to cite you.
Be the same entity everywhere
Models build a picture of who you are from every source they read. If your company name, description, founders and location differ across your site, LinkedIn, directories and press, that picture gets blurry. Blurry entities don’t get named.
Pick one canonical name and a one-sentence description, and use them everywhere, word for word. Link your profiles to each other and to your site. It is boring work, and it is one of the highest-return hours you will spend.
How do you track it?
You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and there is no single dashboard for this yet. Here is the monthly routine I recommend:
- Write a fixed list of 20 to 30 questions your customers really ask. Keep it the same every month.
- Ask each one in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, and in Google’s AI answers.
- Log three things for each: are you mentioned, are you cited with a link, and which competitor appears instead.
- Keep watching your classic numbers too: rankings, organic traffic and referrals from AI tools in your analytics.
- Pick the three questions where you are missing and write or fix one page for each.
Within a few months, you will see which pages earn citations and which don’t. Do more of what works.
Start with one page
You don’t need to rebuild your site. Pick the one question that matters most to your buyers, and make the best page on the internet for it. Structured, quotable, honest and consistent with everything else about you.
If you want a second pair of eyes, send me that question and your page through the studio. I will tell you what I would change first.
Onwards and upwards.
