The handbook
Articles
Deep-dives on individual GEO tactics. Each article opens with a direct answer, cites primary sources, and ends with an implementation checklist.
The AI crawler decision framework — every robots.txt line priced in four currencies
Blocking GPTBot costs almost nothing. Blocking OAI-SearchBot costs 6x your ChatGPT citation share. Here's the full three-lane framework and the exact rules for every major vendor.
ChatGPT Stage 1 in depth: Bing indexation, OpenAI's three crawlers, and IndexNow
ChatGPT Search retrieves exclusively from Bing. Getting into Bing's index is the hard prerequisite that no amount of content optimization fixes. Here's the technical playbook.
What actually gets ChatGPT to cite you — the three-stage pipeline nobody talks about
Bing indexation is table stakes, not the finish line. ChatGPT decides citations across three separate stages, and each one filters out most candidate pages.
Reverse engineering competitor AI citations — the manual audit method
Before you buy a $499/month citation tracker, do the manual audit yourself. Here's the exact eight-step process, the eight gap types, and when the paid tools actually earn their keep.
Content freshness for AI search — the 13-week rule and the 67% freshness lift
About half of Perplexity's citations resolve to content under 13 weeks old. Recently updated pages average 6 AI citations vs 3.6 for stale ones. Here's the refresh cadence that keeps you in the citation pool.
Digital PR for GEO — the 25% earned-media citation surface most brands ignore
Earned media drives 25% of all LLM citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Only 6% of GEO practitioners use it as a primary tactic. Here's the widest arbitrage opportunity in AI search.
Optimizing for Google AI Mode: what a billion monthly users actually means for content strategy
AI Mode passed one billion monthly users a year after debut, with queries doubling every quarter. It's a different surface from AI Overviews — and it rewards different content.
Structured data that actually moves Google AI Overviews citations
Not all schema is equal for AI Overviews. Product+Offer+AggregateRating dominates commercial queries; FAQPage and Article schema dominate informational. Here's the JSON-LD that moves citation share, with real markup.
Which Perplexity model your prompt is running on — and why it changes your citation odds
Sonar, Sonar Pro, Sonar Reasoning Pro, and Sonar Deep Research each pull sources differently. The 2-3x citation-density gap between tiers changes what pages get cited — and how you should test.
The Perplexity-specific Reddit playbook: how to actually earn 46.7% citation-rate presence
Perplexity cites Reddit in 46.7% of B2B SaaS responses — but the mechanics of getting cited by Perplexity from Reddit differ meaningfully from getting cited by ChatGPT. Here is the engine-specific playbook.
Verifying your domain in Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console — the 15-minute setup
Two verifications drive the entire AI search visibility loop: Bing for ChatGPT Search, Google for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Both take one DNS TXT record and 15 minutes. Here's the exact playbook.
How Perplexity actually chooses its sources — and why your rank-12 page can still get cited
Perplexity visits ~10 pages per query, reads them in full via a URL-fetcher, and applies a three-layer reranker. Here's what actually gets a page cited.
Reddit is 27% of ChatGPT's hidden retrieval and 46.7% of Perplexity's citations — what marketers should actually do
Two 2026 studies quantify Reddit's outsized role in AI answers. The visible-citation number is the smallest number that matters.
Answer-first writing — the single highest-leverage GEO change
The one editorial shift that measurably increases AI citations, drawn from three independent 2026 analyses.
Google's May 2026 AI Overviews update: five structural changes and what they mean for GEO
The biggest update since AI Overviews launched. Inline citations, expanded coverage, deeper reasoning — and a shift from rank to citation-worthiness that finally makes GEO measurable.
Getting your brand into LLM training data — the hard truth, and what to do while you wait
40% of ChatGPT answers use live retrieval. The other 60% come from training-data patterns you can't influence overnight. Here's the realistic playbook.
Schema for AI search — what still matters after Google's 2026 guidance
Google says structured data isn't a "requirement" for AI features — but the 2026 evidence says schema is still one of the strongest reliable signals.
Entity-first SEO: how to make your brand exist in machine memory
LLMs organize knowledge as graphs of entities. If your brand isn't a clean node in that graph, you compete with better-defined sources like Wikipedia and Wikidata — and lose.
Measuring GEO in 2026: what actually matters when 67% of AI-driven traffic is untracked
AI bots are 51%+ of global internet traffic. Two-thirds of AI-driven sessions never reach Google Analytics. Here's a measurement framework that survives those blind spots.
Is llms.txt worth the effort in 2026?
Google says llms.txt does nothing for Google Search. Other engines disagree. Here's a pragmatic take — and the file you should ship anyway.
The 89% rule — why earned media matters more than your website for GEO
Onely's 2026 analysis found 89% of LLM citations come from earned sources — PR, Reddit, forums, expert quotes — and only 23% from owned sites. That reshapes the marketing plan.
Measuring GEO — the four metrics that replace rankings
Rankings alone lie now. Citation rate, share of voice, AI referral traffic and AI Performance reports are the four metrics that actually track GEO progress.