How to Build a GEO Strategy

TL;DR

• A GEO strategy is a loop: map prompts, measure your baseline, make content machine readable, publish citable content, earn third-party mentions.

• The Princeton GEO study (KDD 2024) tested optimization on 10,000 queries and showed visibility gains of up to 40% in generative engine responses.

• Citing sources (+40%), adding statistics (+37%) and adding quotations (+22%) moved the needle. Keyword stuffing did almost nothing (+3%).

• Pew Research found users clicked a traditional search link in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, versus 15% when it did not. Pew Research Center

• Track share of voice, citation share, sentiment and source mix. Rankings are no longer the unit of measurement.

• Start with 50 to 250 strategic prompts, not with content production.

Short answer: building a GEO strategy means choosing the prompts your buyers actually type, measuring how AI engines answer them today, then fixing the three levers that decide the answer (technical readability, citable content, third-party authority) and re-measuring monthly.

What a GEO strategy is

Definition: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of influencing how large language models retrieve, cite and describe your brand inside generated answers.

It differs from SEO on three points:

• The unit of visibility is a mention or a citation inside an answer, not a position in a list.

• The surface is plural. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and AI Overviews rarely agree with each other.

• Accuracy matters as much as presence. A model can mention you with outdated pricing or the wrong positioning.

Step 1: Map the prompts that matter

Your prompt set is your keyword list. Build it around buying behaviour, not search volume.

• Problem prompts: "how do I reduce onboarding time for nurses"

• Solution prompts: "best AI visibility tools for agencies"

• Comparison prompts: "X vs Y for enterprise teams"

• Brand prompts: "is [your brand] reliable", "[your brand] pricing"

• Alternative prompts: "alternatives to [competitor]"

Start with 50 prompts for a single market, and scale to 250 when you track several markets or languages.

Step 2: Measure your baseline

You cannot improve what you have never seen. For each prompt, record:

• Presence rate: how often your brand appears

• Share of voice: your mentions versus each competitor

• Sentiment and accuracy: what the model says, and what it gets wrong

• Cited sources: which URLs and domains feed the answer

This is where our GEO platform runs your prompt set across engines over time, so you compare months instead of screenshots. 

Step 3: Make your content machine readable

LLMs extract passages, not pages. Structure decides what can be lifted.

• Answer the question in the first 40 to 60 words of the page

• Use H2s phrased as real questions

• Add one comparison table or bulleted list per key section

• Ship FAQ, Product and Organization schema

• Keep facts in HTML text, never inside images or JavaScript-only components

• Decide explicitly which AI crawlers you allow in robots.txt

• Show a visible "last updated" date

Step 4: Publish content engines can cite

This is where the published research is most actionable.

Source: Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024, based on roughly 10,000 queries.

In practice:

• Replace vague claims with a number, a date and a source link

• Quote named experts and customers, with job titles

• Publish original data, because a model cannot cite a benchmark that does not exist

• Keep one idea per paragraph so a passage can stand alone

One caveat worth knowing: C-SEO Bench (Puerto et al., 2025) found that many conversational SEO tactics do not help and some actively hurt, while plain source relevance keeps working. Manipulation is not a strategy.

Step 5: Earn third-party authority

Models quote the web, not only your site.

• Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit together accounted for 15% of the sources listed in AI summaries, and government sites appeared in 6% of them versus 2% in standard results. ODSC - Open Data Science

• Get listed in the comparison articles and roundups that rank for your category

• Maintain review platform profiles, since they are heavily retrieved

• Place founder and expert commentary in trade media

• Semrush data across 1,000 domains found AI visibility correlates with domain authority (Pearson 0.65), with nofollow links showing nearly the same relationship as follow links. Blck Alpaca

The KPIs to track

Start by separating three objects that are often confused:

• Mention: the model talks about your brand or your products by name.

• Citation: the model pulls one of your pages to build its answer and signals it in the content.

• AI Visibility Score: a composite score of your brand's overall strength in LLM answers.

Then track five metrics:

• Share of voice: how often your brand is mentioned relative to all brand mentions on your prompt set. A brand rarely mentioned cannot score well, which makes this the base of everything else.

• Source share: the share of answers where your own pages are pulled as a source. Being talked about without being read is a fragile position.

• Sentiment: the share of mentions placed in a positive context, measured across every mention, not a sample.

• AI traffic volume: the estimated traffic generated by AI answers, projected from your tracked keyword set.

• AI Visibility Score: the composite metric that weighs the four factors below.

How the AI Visibility Score is built on our GEO platform:

Each of these factors can be broken down further, and a full reporting framework adds prompt coverage, topical visibility and accuracy rate on top. We cover the complete list, what to report monthly and what to stop reporting altogether, in our guide to GEO metrics to track. 

Three mistakes to avoid

• Publishing before measuring. Without a baseline, no lift can be proven.

• Tracking one engine. A brand can be strong in Perplexity and invisible in Gemini.

• Treating GEO as a content project. Half the work is off-site and technical.

Ready to take AI visibility into your own hands?

See exactly where your brand stands across engines, which competitors are cited first, and what to fix next.

Book a demo or download our GEO study to benchmark your category.