AI now decides what gets seen online.

AI systems now influence which content shows up in answers. They scan your writing, pull out key details, and decide whether it fully answers a user’s question.

To earn visibility, you need content that’s structured for AI.
Lead with clear answers, state facts plainly, and show strong authority signals.

SEO doesn’t go far enough.
Traditional SEO tactics weren’t built for how platforms like Gemini and ChatGPT pull answers, summarize content, and cite sources.

To stay visible in AI answers, focus on structure and clarity.
Use descriptive headings, embed FAQs and schema markup, and cite trustworthy sources. These steps help generative engines understand—and surface—your content.

Even Harvard Business Review says it’s time to rethink SEO—LLMs, not just search engines, now shape brand visibility. Forget What You Know About SEO

Why does this matter?

When AI systems clearly understand your content, they’re more likely to share it accurately—and more often. These guidelines show you how to optimize for AI comprehension while keeping human readers engaged. Learn how people actually read online.

SEO helped us reach human readers through Google. But AI platforms require a new approach—enter Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), also known as Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). Here’s the difference…

GEO vs. AEO: Strategy vs. Execution

AEO—Answer Engine Optimization—is the strategy. It starts with a core principle: AI can’t surface what it doesn’t understand. It helps generative engines interpret, summarize, and include your content in their responses.

GEO—Generative Engine Optimization—is the execution. It turns that strategy into action. By stressing semantic clarity, contextual depth, and AI‑friendly language, GEO makes content discoverable and usable in AI answers.

In short: AEO is the strategy; GEO is the execution.

I’m going to use both names interchangeably so we don’t get tangled up in acronyms. 😎

Your Action Plan for GEO Success

PLAN IT

Make Your Content AI-Ready from the Start

1. Write in a modular, answer-focused sections
   Break your content into short, focused sections—each answering a single question in 75–300 words. AI engines pull answers in chunks, so make sure each section delivers value on its own.
2. Group related topics to build authority
   Organize your content into topic clusters. Link related pages to reinforce your expertise and help AI engines understand how your content pieces fit together. (see graphic below)
3. Anticipate Follow-Up Questions
   AI search often happens in stages, with users asking follow-up questions in the same session. Structure your content to answer the initial query—and then go deeper. Address likely next questions or related topics. This increases your chances of appearing across multiple steps in the user’s search journey.
4. Name people,  products, and places clearly
   Mention your brand, products, people, and partners by name. This helps AI systems connect your content with recognized entities.

STRUCTURE IT

1. Lead with a clear, direct answer or key fact before expanding.
   State key stats, outcomes, and claims in straightforward language. Example: “Company X cut fraud by 35% in 12 months.” Avoid burying facts in marketing language—AI struggles to extract facts hidden inside promotional copy.
2. Use clear H2 and H3 headers that map to real questions
   Format your subheadings as questions people actually ask. This helps generative engines recognize and reuse your content when answering similar user queries.
3. Optimize your URL structure
   Use clear, descriptive URLs that include key terms
4. Add descriptive alt text—but only for images with data or key insights
   Focus on images that show facts, processes, or results. For example, instead of saying “dashboard screenshot,” describe what the dashboard shows: “Graph showing 35% fraud reduction over 12 months.”
5. Use structured data and schema markup. Add FAQ, HowTo, or Product schema where it makes sense. Structured data helps AI engines understand your content’s format and key sections—making it easier for them to extract and surface your information in answers.

TEST IT

See If Your Content Shows Up in AI Answers

1. 1. Run real-world AI searches
      Test your content in tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. You can also license ChatHub to see all platforms at once. Ask the kinds of questions your audience would. See if your brand gets mentioned—or if your content is cited in the answer.
   2. Check your visibility in AI engines
      Use tools like ChatHub to run searches like: “Top [your product] platforms.” Does your brand appear? If not, it’s a sign your content may need stronger signals for AI discovery.
   3. Track branded question queries over time
      Set up recurring searches or alerts for key branded questions. Monitor where your brand appears in AI answers—and adjust your content based on what’s being cited (or what’s missing).

Step-by-Step Content Optimization for AI Search

Start with the essentials—these steps help AI engines identify, summarize, and cite your content accurately.

Content Creation Fundamentals

1. Write Unique, Meaningful Page Titles

A page title, defined by the HTML <title> tag, is the text displayed on search engine results pages and browser tabs.

Why it matters: It tells both people and AI-driven platforms what your page is about.

Best Practice: Make every page title unique and focused. Summarize your content’s value clearly—without repeating exact phrases from the body text. Use our free tool to visualize your meta data.

2. Create In-Depth, Comprehensive Content

Your content needs to answer real questions with clear facts, insights, and explanations. Aim for full-topic coverage—typically 1,500 words or more.

Go beyond surface-level content. AI search favors unique data, expert insights, and actionable comparisons. Pages that help users understand, decide, or solve problems get prioritized.

What to include:

1. 1. • Multiple perspectives and angles on the topic
      • Real-world case studies or practical examples
      • Data points that reinforce your claims
      • Clear definitions of technical terms
      • Unique frameworks, tips, or templates

Example: Instead of a brief overview like “What is cloud computing?” build out full sections covering service types, implementation strategies, costs, and security considerations.  Use real examples from known industry players like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

3. Make Your Text Easy for LLMs to Read — and Quote

AI models don’t browse—they extract. If your content isn’t structured for machines to understand, it won’t get quoted.

Use formatting that machines understand:

If people struggle to follow your content, AI will too. Read your paragraphs out loud. If they sound stiff or robotic, rewrite them until they flow like natural speech.

What helps:

1. 1. • Write in short, factual blocks (2–4 sentences/paragraph)
      • Use H2s and H3s to separate ideas clearly
      • Create FAQs and question-based headings to boost snippet potential
      • Add bullets, bold terms, and clear formatting
      • Include clear captions—these help AI summarize your visuals and make content more accessible to all readers.

How do you write a “citation-ready” paragraph?

4. Focus on Topic Relevance—Not Keywords

AI systems don’t rely on exact-match keywords like traditional search engines. Instead, they look for natural language patterns and topic relevance.

Focus on clarity first. Use different ways to describe the same concept, just like people do in real conversations. Spread these variations naturally across your page—but avoid forcing repetitive phrases.

Keep your language varied and authentic. Prioritize clear communication over trying to “optimize” for specific terms.

Example: If you’re writing about “digital marketing strategies,” you might naturally mention phrases like “online marketing tactics” or “ways to reach your audience online.”

5. Cover the Full Buyer Journey—So AI Can Too

Make sure your content meets your audience at each stage of their decision-making process:

1. 1. • Awareness: Explain the basics.
      • Consideration: Help users compare solutions.
      • Decision: Show what happens next.

Match your content’s format and depth to each stage. Keep early-stage content light and educational. Make later-stage materials more detailed and solution-driven.

Don’t overlook documentation sites

For software companies, developer docs and knowledge bases are prime GEO opportunities. AI platforms pull from fact-based, technical content when generating answers.

We’re already seeing it in client analytics: ChatGPT is sending visitors directly to documentation pages—a clear sign that AI systems rely on these sources.

Content Formats and Organization

6. Use Multiple Content Formats—But Make Each One Count

Mix text, video, images, and interactive elements—but only when each adds unique value.

For every format you include, give AI enough context to understand it. That could mean adding descriptive captions for important images, providing text summaries for videos (and video schema), or offering brief explanations for charts and interactive elements.

Example: Support a written explanation with an infographic, a short how-to video, or an interactive chart—just make sure every element is properly labeled and described.

Authority and Trust Building

E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) is a critical framework used by search engines and AI platforms to assess content quality and trustworthiness. Strong signals help LLMs identify your content as high-quality and authoritative within your field. Here’s how to optimize for each component:

7. Build Authority and Earn Trust

1. • Show credentials and expertise
     • Display author qualifications and professional experience.
     • Link to author profiles when it adds credibility.
   • Build Third-Party Trust Signals
     • Get quoted or linked from trusted domains (e.g., Wikipedia, industry publications, forums). AI Trains on Wikipedia – you should too.
     • Earn citations via expert comments, guest articles, or original research (charts, data, short studies)
     • Mention trusted sources to help LLMs connect your content with credible information
   • Publish original research
     • Conduct and include proprietary surveys, studies, or case studies.
     • Clearly label original findings.
   • Keep content fresh
     • Include clear revision dates.
     • Update regularly to maintain accuracy and relevance.
   • Provide contact and accountability
     • Add author or organizational contact information.
     • Include an editorial review or fact-checking statement where appropriate.
   • Be data-driven
     • Content with specific data points is 40% more likely to appear more often in LLM-generated responses
     • Use relevant statistics, research findings, and measurable outcomes to support every claim.
     • Example: Answer fact-based questions like “How much paper does APRIL produce yearly?” with precise, sourced data.
   • Cite authoritative voices
     • Direct quotes from experts improve reliability by up to 23%, especially in complex topics like ESG.
     • Citations from reputable sources can improve credibility by up to 20%.
   • Write with authority and confidence
     • Make specific, bold claims backed by evidence.
     • An authoritative tone makes your content up to 30% more likely to appear in AI-generated answers and build reader trust.

AI-Ready Content Structure & Rendering

8. Build Topic Clusters to Reinforce Authority — and Be Found by AI

Internal linking isn’t just about navigation. When you group related content around a core topic and connect those pages with clear, consistent language, you help AI understand what your site is known for—and surface it accordingly.

Think of it as creating a topic cluster:

1. 1. • Create a pillar page that covers the main topic
      • Linked sub-pages dive into related, specific ideas
      • Every link reinforces the relationship between them

Example: Link your “Introduction to Machine Learning” page to focused posts on algorithms, applications, and real-world use cases.

This structure gives both AI and human readers a clearer path—and a reason to trust you know what you’re talking about.

9. FAQ & Schema Markup Optimization

Schema is structured data added to web pages to help search engines understand and display content more effectively. It plays a significant role in supporting LLMs and enhancing their understanding of web content.

Start by identifying the questions your sales team hears most often—or use tools like ChatGPT to uncover common customer queries.

Keep answers short and focused—about 2 to 4 sentences per question. Use a simple, structured Q&A format (see the FAQ section at the bottom of this page for an example).

For more complex topics or common misconceptions, consider creating dedicated FAQ pages. Update your FAQs regularly based on new customer questions and changing search trends.

Guidelines for On-Page FAQ Count

Create and Optimize FAQ Schema for SEO and AI

Use our FAQ Schema tool to quickly create structured markup for your FAQs—no coding needed.

Apply the schema to relevant pages like blogs, product pages, service pages, or support sections.

Don’t forget when writing FAQ Schema content to:

1. • Keep answers concise and directly relevant to the question.
   • Avoid fluff, over-promotion, or vague language.
   • Use “Definition:” headers for AI models that prioritize term extraction.
   • Add a “Summary:” section at the end of longer topics to help AI models generate accurate overviews.

10. Optimize for Voice Search

Write the way people speak when asking questions out loud. Use natural, conversational phrases—especially long-tail questions that mirror how users talk to voice assistants.

Make sure your site works well on mobile, since most voice searches happen there. If location matters, include city or neighborhood references to help AI understand local relevance.

Example: Instead of writing “enterprise cloud solutions,” phrase it like: “What’s the best cloud platform for growing businesses?”

11. JavaScript Rendering and AI Crawlers

AI search engine crawlers like OpenAI’s GPTBot and ClaudeBot can’t execute JavaScript, even though they download JS files. That creates a major visibility gap for websites that rely on client-side rendering.

How This Affects Your Visibility

If your site uses client-side JavaScript to load key content, AI crawlers may only see:

• Blank or incomplete pages
• Missing metadata and product details
• Unrendered or missing dynamic content

JavaScript Optimization Strategy

1. Implement server-side rendering (SSR) or static site generation (SSG) for critical content
2. Deliver core content in static HTML, including:
   • Page text and headings
   • Metadata
   • Product information
3. Test your site with AI crawler simulation tools (like ChatHub)

This approach ensures your content remains visible to AI systems, improving your site’s presence in AI-powered search results and training data.

Learn more about AI crawlers.

12. Measure the Payoff: Track AI-Driven Traffic

After optimizing for AI visibility, track referral traffic from AI platforms.
Use Google Analytics or similar tools to monitor visitors from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other tools that pass referrer data. Look for domains like chat.openai.com and perplexity.ai.

Focus on trends and patterns, not single data points. Watch for increases in branded search traffic, longer time on page, or higher engagement on content you’ve optimized for AI search.

Google doesn’t report AI Overviews separately. This is a total bummer!

Clicks from AI Overviews are blended into your overall organic search traffic, with no way to isolate them.

If showing up in AI Overviews matters to you, the best way to check is to run manual searches for your target terms/questions and see if your content appears.

The Proof

After applying GEO best practices, this FBO Accounts article quickly reached Google’s top 3 organic results for ‘FBO accounts.’ It also appears in Google’s AI Overviews—proof that AI-optimized content drives both search ranking and AI answer visibility.

Are You Ready for a World Where Prospects May Never Visit Your Website?

AI agents are changing how buyers make decisions.

Instead of clicking search results, buyers now ask AI assistants for advice—and those assistants do the research for them.

Content must “speak to the machines”

Your content needs to speak to these autonomous decision-makers.Structure it as clear, factual answers that AI agents can easily find, understand, and quote in their recommendations.

In this future, your visibility depends on being quotable, trustworthy, and everywhere agents look.

GEO Implementation Strategy

Start by applying these optimization techniques to your highest-priority content:

• Core service or product pages
• Key educational resources
• High-traffic blog posts
• Landing pages

Free Tools You’ll Need for Implementation

🔧 Run a quick content audit for a URL. Spot issues with structure, headings, summaries, and readability—before you rewrite.

🔧 Test your content with our content optimizer. Paste any URL to get a rewritten, AI-friendly draft—structured for search engines and LLMs.

🔧 Create FAQ Schema Markup: Turn Q&As into structured data. Paste your content and get ready-to-use schema—no coding required!

Want to show up in Google AI summaries?

Focus on longer, question-based queries—these are the ones Google selects for AI Overviews.

Pew’s research makes it clear: if your content doesn’t appear in the summary, users probably won’t see it. They’re skipping the blue links—even the top ones.

Research: % of Google searches in March 2025 that produced an AI Overview

Here’s what to do:

1. 1. Rewrite the opening to answer the main question in 1–2 clear sentences. Keep it tight—30 to 50 words max.

   2. Break up dense text. Add FAQs, definitions, and bullets. Maximum sentence length: 20 words.

   3. Monitor in Google Analytics your web pages that receive LLM traffic.

Results We’ve Seen

Once we began optimizing content for Galileo-FT.com for AI discovery, referrals from ChatGPT jumped to the client’s #7 traffic source—a clear sign that AI-focused content strategies drive measurable results.

Speak AI

Your New Marketing Dictionary →

• Content Architecture
  How you organize and structure information across your site to help both humans and AI find and understand it.
• Content Summarization 
  How AI condenses your page into a brief answer or snippet. If your content isn’t clearly structured, AI may misrepresent—or skip—it entirely.
• Generative AI
  AI tools that create new content—like text, images, code, or audio—based on patterns from their training data.
• LLM (Large Language Model)
  AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude that process and understand human language.
• Semantic Search
  A context-aware search approach where AI focuses on understanding user intent—not just keywords.

Frequently Asked Questions

Updated: 2025-07-31 — We keep this page current with the latest research on how LLMs read, rank, and summarize content.