GEO & AEO: Getting Cited by AI, Not Just Ranked by Google

Through a defined prompt set rather than a rank position. We run real buyer-intent prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews to establish a baseline of who currently gets cited — a share-of-AI-voice measurement against named competitors. Then we re-run the same prompt set on a recurring cadence and track whether citation frequency and share of voice move. It's a measurable baseline and a measurable trend, which is what distinguishes methodology from a pitch.

They don't all retrieve and synthesize information the same way, so treating them as a single identical target is a shortcut rather than a methodology. The shared foundation — entity authority, structured data, and genuinely useful extractable content — applies across all of them. Beyond that, each engine has its own retrieval and synthesis behavior, which is why we audit citations per engine rather than reporting a single blended number. A strategy built around one engine's behavior doesn't automatically transfer to another.

It's real and worth implementing, and it's not a guaranteed ranking lever — we say both plainly. llms.txt signals how AI crawlers should treat and attribute your content. It's an emerging practice the industry is still standardizing rather than a settled convention with predictable results, so we implement it as one input among several. Any vendor promising specific outcomes from adding a single file is overselling something that hasn't been standardized yet.

It depends on where you're starting from and how much of the foundation is already in place. The audit and baseline come first, and they're immediate — you'll know where you stand and who's currently being cited for your prompts. Structural and entity work takes effect as it's implemented, and citation tracking then shows movement on a recurring cadence. We won't commit to a specific timeline in advance, because that would be exactly the kind of guaranteed-results pitch this discipline doesn't support yet.

If you don't reliably rank for your core terms in traditional Google search yet, that usually signals the underlying technical SEO and entity-authority foundation isn't there — and GEO work layered on top of it tends to underperform. Entity authority and structured data are largely the same fundamentals that support traditional technical SEO, so the two aren't independent. In that situation, technical SEO is often the right starting point, with GEO following once the foundation is solid rather than instead of it.