GEO in one paragraph
Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of making your site easy to cite by LLM-powered answer engines: ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude with web access, Google's AI overviews, Bing Copilot. It overlaps heavily with classic SEO but optimizes for being quoted as a source, not just appearing in a results list.
What is actually different from SEO
Three things matter more than they did. Three things matter less than the breathless tweets claim.
- Citability: source-quotable sentences an LLM can extract verbatim
- Structured data: JSON-LD that tells the model what each page IS
- Machine-readable summaries: /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt as curated entry points
- Keyword density (LLMs read meaning, not term frequency)
- Backlink quantity (a few authoritative citations beat volume)
- Page-speed micro-optimizations (still matters for users, not the LLM signal)
The actual GEO checklist
These are the things I implement on every site I ship. That is the list. Most of the rest is paid course material.
- Add /llms.txt with a one-paragraph site description and a curated link list
- Add /llms-full.txt with concatenated long-form markdown of your key pages
- Add JSON-LD on every page: Organization sitewide, Article on posts, Service on service pages, FAQPage on Q&A pages, Person for the founder
- Write FAQ sections in question-and-direct-answer form so they get quoted cleanly
- Allow GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, Applebot-Extended in robots.txt
- Cite the same recognitions, awards, dates, and numbers consistently across pages so LLMs can triangulate
- Get cited on 2 to 3 high-authority external pages (platform profile, conference page, press mention)
What to actually track
There is no Search Console for ChatGPT yet. What you can track:
- Brand-name search volume as a proxy for whether LLMs are surfacing you
- Direct referrals from chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai (small numbers but useful)
- Periodic manual checks: ask Perplexity "who builds websites for nonprofits?" once a month and see if you appear
How I bake GEO into every client build
Every site I build ships with the GEO layer above by default. It adds maybe four hours to a site build and is the single highest-impact thing I do for client visibility right now. The full web development service page → has the longer version, and the consulting page → is where orgs with existing sites usually start.
We look at your current site, what answer engines already say about you, and the 4 to 6 fixes that would move the needle this quarter.