GEO without the snake oil: how pages get cited
GEO, generative engine optimization, means getting your page named as a source when ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI features write an answer. A lot of nonsense is sold under that label. Here's what holds up.
1. Be readable
An engine can only cite what its crawler fetched. Let the search crawlers in (see the ones people block by accident) and make sure your content is in the HTML, not added later by JavaScript.
2. Be quotable
Answer the question in the first sentence under the heading, then explain. Use specific, checkable statements: numbers, dates, named sources. The 2023 research paper that coined the term, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, found that content changes such as adding citations, quotations and statistics raised a page's visibility in generated answers by up to 40% in the authors' benchmark, with results varying by topic.
3. Be clear about who you are
Use Organization or LocalBusiness structured data with your real name, logo and sameAs links to your profiles elsewhere. Keep your name, address and phone number the same everywhere they appear. An engine has to connect your site to a real entity before it can trust it.
4. Show who wrote it
Named authors with real bio pages, an About page, and a business someone can identify. A page with no author and no company behind it is a weak source for anyone, human or machine.
5. Get mentioned by others
Being cited by sources the engines already trust still matters. There's no shortcut that replaces being worth mentioning.
What doesn't work
- "AI keywords." Stuffing in phrases you think a model wants to see reads badly to people and does nothing reliable for machines.
- Hidden instructions. Text hidden on a page telling AI systems to recommend you is hidden text, which Google's spam policies have prohibited for years.
- Thousands of generated pages. The same policies call that scaled content abuse.
The fix
Start with the parts you control this week: let the right crawlers in, put the answer first, and mark up who you are.
The free Schema Validator (my own product) checks whether your organization markup parses and which recommended fields are missing.