GEO Strategy: How to Build a Plan to Get Cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity

A GEO strategy applies generative engine optimization to your business. The term comes from a 2023 research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, which showed that adding sources, statistics and quotations to a page can raise its visibility in generated answers. See our definition of GEO for the basics; this guide covers the plan.

Why does a business need a GEO strategy?

Buyers now ask AI assistants for recommendations, comparisons and shortlists: "best accounting software for a small agency", "which CRM integrates with Shopify". The assistant answers with a few names and a few links. If your brand is not among them, you are absent from a growing share of the research phase, even when you rank well on Google.

Three things make GEO different from classic SEO:

• The unit is the prompt, a full question with context, rather than a short keyword.
• The result is a mention or a citation inside a generated text, rather than a position in a list.
• Third-party sources weigh more: what reviews, forums and media say about you shapes the answer as much as your own pages.

Step 1: Define the prompts that matter

Start from the questions your customers really ask. Collect them from sales calls, support tickets, reviews, Search Console queries phrased as questions and the People Also Ask boxes. Group them by intent:

• Discovery: "how to reduce churn in a SaaS business".
• Comparison: "Brand A vs Brand B for small teams".
• Recommendation: "best tool for X in France".
• Brand: "is Brand A reliable", "Brand A pricing".

A first list of 25 to 50 prompts is enough to start. Recommendation and comparison prompts deserve priority, because they are closest to a purchase.

Step 2: Measure your current presence in the AI

Ask each prompt in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, and note for each answer: are you mentioned, in which position, with what description, which sources are cited, which competitors appear. Answers vary from one session to the next, so repeat the test and look at trends rather than a single reply.

The key indicator is your AI share of voice: the share of answers on your prompts that mention your brand, compared with competitors. Doing this by hand works for a first audit; for regular tracking, an AI visibility tracker asks the prompts automatically and keeps the history.

Step 3: Publish content the AI can cite

AI assistants usually extract short passages from a page. A page gets cited when one of its sections answers a sub-question clearly and can be understood on its own. The habits that work:

1. Put a direct answer of two to four sentences at the top of the page and under each heading.
2. Phrase headings as the questions people ask.
3. Give definitions, figures with their source, dates and units.
4. Use tables for comparisons, prices and criteria.
5. Cover comparison and "best X" topics honestly, including competitors, because those pages answer recommendation prompts.
6. Update pages when facts change, and show the date.

Our glossary entry on AI citations explains how assistants choose and display their sources.

Step 4: Make your brand a clear, consistent entity

Language models build a picture of your brand from everything they read. Contradictions blur it. Use the same name, the same one-line description, the same category and the same key facts (founding year, location, offer, prices) on your site, your social profiles, directories, marketplaces and partner pages. Add Organization structured data with links to your official profiles, and an About page that states plainly who you are and what you sell.

Step 5: Earn mentions on the sources the AI read

When an assistant answers "which is the best X", it often relies on comparison articles, review platforms, Reddit and forum threads, YouTube videos, Wikipedia and trade media. Your GEO strategy needs a plan for those sources:

• Identify the pages cited on your priority prompts (step 2 gives the list).
• Get included in the comparison articles that already rank, with accurate information.
• Collect customer reviews on the platforms that matter in your sector.
• Take part in community discussions with useful answers, without spam.
• Publish original data that media and bloggers will want to cite.

Step 6: Open your site to AI crawlers

An assistant cannot cite a page it cannot read. Check your robots.txt for the main AI user agents: OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), and Google-Extended, which controls the use of your content for Gemini training without affecting Google Search. Blocking search crawlers removes you from live answers. Serve your main content in HTML, without depending on heavy JavaScript, and keep pages fast.

An llms.txt file, a Markdown summary of your key pages proposed at llmstxt.org, is an optional extra. Few assistants confirm they use it, and Google states in its documentation on AI features and your website that no special file is needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Treat it as a low-cost bonus, never as the core of the plan.

Step 7: Track, learn, repeat

GEO results move with every model update and every new article published in your market. Re-run your prompts at least monthly, compare your share of voice with competitors, list the sources cited in your place, and turn each gap into an action: a page to write, a comparison to join, a fact to correct.

What does a GEO strategy look like on one page?

How do GEO and SEO work together?

They share most of their foundations. AI assistants that search the web start from search results, so pages that rank on Google and Bing have more chances of being read. Helpful content, clear structure, authority and a sound technical base serve both. GEO adds three layers: thinking in prompts, writing for passage extraction, and managing your reputation on third-party sources. A team that already does good SEO can add GEO without starting over.

A GEO strategy turns AI visibility into a measurable plan: the right prompts, citable content, a consistent brand and mentions where the AI read. To run it continuously, Sorank tracks your prompts in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini (plus Perplexity and Grok from the Pro plan), shows who is cited in your place and publishes optimized articles on autopilot, with a 3-day free trial.