How to Rank in ChatGPT, Gemini & Google AI (GEO Explained)

Search is changing.

Instead of scrolling through Google results, more people are turning to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity for instant answers. That shift is creating a new opportunity: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

In this episode, I break down what GEO is, how AI search actually works, and the five practical strategies you can use to get your brand, website, and content cited in AI-generated answers.

We'll cover the differences between SEO and GEO, how AI chooses its sources, why content structure matters, and how to build authority across the web so your business stays visible as search evolves.

If you rely on organic marketing, this is a conversation you can't afford to miss.

Transcript

0:00

Quick question. When was the last time you actually tried to Google something? Like you really sat down, typed a query into Google, scrolled through a bunch of links, and actually opened them, verified the sources, and tried to piece together an answer yourself. Maybe it's less now than it was before because more and more people now aren't doing those kind of searches anymore. They're going straight to Chat GPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Clawed, and they're typing in a full question with a lot of context, and they get a full answer, and they never even visit a single website. This creates a massive problem if you're a business owner, if you're a marketer or a content creator who has relied on organic marketing strategies to get discovered, like SEO. But on the other side of massive disruption is also a lot of opportunity as well, if you know how to play it correctly. Today I'm going to show you exactly the ins and outs of GEO, which stands for generative engine optimization, and show you exactly how to get your brand, your business, your content shown up inside the Google AI answers. This is the evolution of SEO and it's very new. So a lot of people haven't figured this out yet. And that is why I'm making this video to help you guys understand GEO and implement it into your content, into your business strategy. So let's start with the very basics, the foundations of what is generative engine optimization. Well, it's basically SEO, but for AI. So instead of trying to rank on page one of Google or other search engines, which is traditionally how the goal of SEO, you're trying to be part of the actual answer that chat, GPT, Gemini, Claw Perplexity generates for the person asking the question. And the difference for the end user is way better. Instead of getting 10 uh blue links to click on and hope that you find the best one, or maybe you have to click through all 10 to uh figure out which one actually can help you. With geo, the AI just answers that question directly and pulls from specific sources to do that. So the goal of GEO is to be one of those sources which the AI recommends. Here is something important to understand there is no position one in GEO, it doesn't work like that. What you're tracking instead is how many times your brand, your business, your content shows up across a wide range of AI responses. And why this matters so much right now is ChatGPT currently has 800 million weekly users and Google's AI overviews are showing up across billions of searches every single month. So before you can optimize for something, you have to understand how it actually works. So let's break this down. So when someone asks AI a question, it doesn't just paste that question into a search bar. What it actually does is it breaks down the question into multiple subqueries and it searches for each one of those set individually. So if someone goes to Chat GPT and asks, for example, what is the best email marketing platform for a small coaching business? The AI might search for the best email marketing platforms 2026, email marketing for coaches, or email marketing pricing for small businesses, as three totally separate searches but related to the original question. This process is called query fan out and it pulls specific passages from those websites which answer those specific subqueries. And then what it does is it mashes the answers together using something called RAG, which stands for retrieval augmented generation, and then it compiles the answer for those separate subqueries using the passages which are relevant to each subquery from different websites. Then it cites the sources that it pulled from, and those citations send traffic back to the websites that were used in that answer. So what does that mean for you, the marketer or the business owner? What it means is you can't just optimize for the big broad question that someone will ask. You have to instead think about all the smaller subqueries within that broad question that the AI is asking in the background and make sure your content shows up for those. Now I know what some of you are thinking, is SEO dead? And I believe no, absolutely not. These models use live web searches to find their sources. So if your SEO is currently already strong and performing well, then GEO automatically pulls from that. They work together synergistically. The difference is SEO, you're trying to get on page one, with GEO, you're trying to be cited in the answer. And SEO was built around keywords and backlinks, whereas GEO is built around content structure and signals of authority. The biggest shift is now actually how people are searching. With Google, the average amount of words in a search was just four words. With AI, it's 23 on the average search query. People are having a conversation with the AI, they're giving it a lot more context and they're telling them a lot more about their situation. And the AI responds with its recommendation, not just a list of links. And now because people are using the Google traditional search box a lot less, they're moving towards these AI platforms. If you are not cited in the answer, then you're technically invisible. Alright, so let's get into the brass tactics. Here are the five things that you need to be doing to make sure that you show up in AI search. Step one is making sure the AI can actually crawl your site, that there's no blockers on there preventing it from crawling your site. So how AI searches work is they use bots to crawl all of the web. ChatGPT uses GPT bot, anthropic uses ClaudeBot, and Perplexity PerplexityBot. So if these bots are actually blocked from your site for whatever reason, then you simply cannot show up for the answers. So go and check your robot text file right now. You just go to your website URL forward slash robots.txt. If you see one of these bots like GPT bot or clawed bot listed as disallow, then fix that. Also, if you're using Cloudflare, they recently changed their default settings to block AI crawlers automatically. So head over to your Cloudflare dashboard and just check the AI crawl metrics page. Also, one more thing if your content loads dynamically through JavaScript, AI cannot read that. It understands HTML only. So if any of your key website content is hidden behind interactive elements or tabs, then move it to the actual page HTML. Step number two is to structure your content like how and similar to how an AI would write it. So what do I mean by this? Well, AI is looking for content that it can pull a clean, self-contained answer from. So if your content is just one big wall of text, they're gonna skip it. Here is the formula. You put your answer first, context second. So every page, every blog post, every piece of content should start with a two to three sentence statement about what your content is addressing. Something that the AI could literally just paste into the response and then you go into the detail. Make sure you use clear headings, h1, h2, h3, and you separate each heading by the topic. Write question-based headings. Instead of our services, put what services do we offer for coaches. If you're breaking down a process or features, use bullet points or numbered lists. Recent research looked at 10,000 different AI searches and found that websites with structured lists and statistics had between 30 and 40% high relevance showing up in AI responses. So that's not a small amount, that's pretty big. So if you're explaining processes or comparisons or features, make sure you use structured lists and bullet points. Also, keep paragraphs short. Don't write huge essay paragraphs, two to three sentences max per paragraph. And because AI is based around specific questions and subqueries, make sure you add a frequently asked questions section to relevant pages of your website and mark them up with FAQ schema. This basically signals to AI which part of your website and page answer these specific questions. Step number three is to add relevant sources to your website. Things like sources from where you pulled information from, expert stats, quotes. Research has shown that adding statistics to your content boosts your AI citations by 37%, and adding direct sources boosts them by 40%. A name quote with a title from a reputable name and a company attached is a strong credibility signal for the AI. Show real experiences, real examples of your work, testimonials, case studies, this all makes a difference. Step number four is to keep your content fresh. Now, this catches a lot of people off guard. Let's say you already have a lot of content out there on your website, AI doesn't care. AI has a bias towards recent recency and frequency. And research shows that content posted over three months ago has a pretty dramatic dramatic drop-off in AI citations. And some platforms like Perplexity actually prefer content that has been posted in the last 90 days. So what that means is you can't just publish and forget. Go back to your most important pages on your site and update them once every quarter. Update the stats, update the examples, add a date, you know, updated on this date to show the AI that you know you've recently worked on that page and improved it. It will boost that page's ranking significantly. And pages updated within the last 30 days have a 3.2x more AI citations than pages which do not. Step five is to build your presence beyond your own website. AI doesn't just learn about your brand from your website, it learns from everywhere across the internet. So that could be YouTube, LinkedIn, forums, Reddit, third-party articles, Wikipedia. All of it talks to the AI and feeds back to those answers. So how do you take advantage of this? Well, you want to figure out which sites are being cited by AI around your target topics. Just search for your main topics on Chat GPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, whichever LLM you use, and see the sources that it mentions. Then aim to get your brand mentioned by those sources. An example of how you could do this is by reaching out to an author of a blog post in your target topic and ask to be referenced. And Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube are among the top sources regularly cited by major LLM platforms. So to build real visibility on these platforms over time, you have to be posting relevant content regularly as well. The frequency does matter. Alright, so how do we track it? How do we know that any of this is working? Let's say you followed all the above five steps. How do you actually know? How do you measure it? Traditional Google Analytics won't tell you because most AI searches don't generate a click. The user gets the answer and never actually visits the website. The true metric you want to track is how often your brand and content appears in AI responses across multiple platforms in comparison to your competition. So you can start by doing this manually. Pick 10 to 20 relevant questions around your business and go to your preferred LLM and enter those questions in and see if your brand shows up for any of them. Whether you show up, where which platform, how you're described, and do this every month. So there are tools that automate this, things like LLM Revs, there's also Zerply and a few others. And what these do is they track your citation responses, they track your share of the AI voice response, and also you can compare where your competitors are showing up across multiple different platforms. So if you want to take this a little bit more seriously, then it might be worth investing in one of these tools. Another thing worth mentioning is to check your server logs for the Chat GPT user, user agent. If it's getting traffic from this, that is a good sign because it means your website is being cited by the AI. So here's the bottom line traditional search is changing fast. It's not gonna wipe out Google overnight, but it's already eating into its traffic in a big way. And as these tools get better and better, it's only gonna accelerate. So the businesses which figure out how to optimize for GEO now are gonna have a huge advantage in the coming two to three years. But the good news is if you already have a strong content marketing presence and your SEO is already strong, then you're already most of the way there. You just need to tweak how you structure your content, how often you update it, and how actively you're building a presence beyond your own website. So if you want any help implementing this or you just want to talk through your current content and marketing strategy, then there is a link in the description of this video to book an intro call with myself, and we can map out exactly what this looks like for your business. And if you haven't already, grab my free digital marketing resources in the description too. Make sure you like the video, subscribe if you haven't already, and drop a comment below. I'll see you on the next one.