Your boss wants a GEO strategy, what now?

Here are 12 tips to help you look good and actually get results.

So you’re in a meeting. Someone senior has just said, “We need a GEO strategy,” whilst looking at you with the confidence of a general pointing at a map.

Everyone nods. You nod too, because you are a PR or marketing professional. Inside, your brain is giving you the impression of the Windows Blue Screen of Death.

This blog is for that moment. It’s designed to be practical, too because you need to deliver something credible, measurable, and useful for your brand, with insights into realistic targets, real politics, and the scrutiny that comes with GEO. I’ve written this mainly with growing or enterprise b2b companies in mind but there should also be some good stuff if you work in b2c or other areas.

First, what exactly is GEO, and why does it matter?

GEO usually stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It’s the practice of improving how your brand, products, expertise and content show up in answers generated by models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, especially when people ask questions like “What are the key trends on X topic?”, “What are the best platforms for Y?” and “Compare vendor A vs vendor B for this use case.”

The shift is more about behaviour than just technology. More people now use AI tools as always-on research assistants. They start with questions, not keywords, much like the Star Trek computer. They want advice, comparisons, and recommendations long before they ever fill out a “Talk to Sales” form.

So GEO matters because visibility is changing. It’s less “rank #1 for a term”, more “be present in the narrative when buyers are forming opinions”.

Why all the acronyms, and how do they differ?

The acronym bamboozling is real. Here’s a sanity-saving breakdown:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Optimizing for traditional search results (Google, Bing), usually driven by keywords, pages, and links.
• AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): Optimizing for direct answers, often in search features (featured snippets, knowledge panels, voice assistants). Think “getting the answer box”.
• AIO (AI Optimization): A vague umbrella term people use to mean “optimizing for AI”, sometimes including content quality, structured data, and model-facing visibility.
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Specifically focused on AI-generated answers, the sources they cite, and the patterns that make AI models more likely to mention you.

Clear? Probably not. Don’t worry. In practice, these overlap, and when most people talk about GEO, they mean a combination of AI visibility and influence in answers across both AI models and AI overviews in search engines like Google. The most useful mental model is: SEO helps you get discovered, AEO helps you get answered, GEO helps you get included in the story AI tells.

Jump into ‘GEO action’

Now, onto the part you actually came for. How to respond to the “get me GEO strategy pronto request.”

1) Find out what your boss actually means by “GEO”

Now your boss might have read a thoughtful paper on AI discovery. But they might have seen a spicy X post and decided you need “a GEO” by next Tuesday.

Don’t assume you’re thinking the same things. Ask (politely!) what success looks like.

Is it: Brand awareness and credibility? Visibility that supports the sales pipeline? Mentions in a specific model or search engine? Getting more mentions than a competitor? Influencing what sources AI uses when it answers questions? Or something else entirely.

Plus, let’s be honest: you might not fully understand what GEO, AEO, and the rest mean yet, because the industry is still figuring out the definitions and ideas very quickly. That’s okay. What matters is setting measurable outcomes.

“AI visibility” is not the only metric to measure AI success. Plus, AI visibility may not even be possible for your brand. For start-ups and scale-ups, “being named by the model” can be unrealistic early on because you lack the broader web footprint and third-party endorsements (reviews, media coverage, community chatter). Similarly, if you are in a highly competitive market competing against established players with massive online visibility and deep pockets, getting your brand mentioned will be harder. In those cases, a smarter KPI is often: improve presence in the sources AI tends to cite, like media, directories, LinkedIn and community platforms.

That’s how you look strategic, not panicked when it comes to reporting back.

2) Resist the urge to declare yourself a GEO expert

Right now, GEO is a bit of the Wild West. It’s tempting to stride into the boss’s office like you are the sheriff of Generative Town. But don’t.

A lot of “best practice” advice right now will age like a cheap bottle of wine. Models change. Sources used by AIs will change.  The AI discovery tools are immature. Data like search volumes is partial. Anyone speaking in absolutes is either lying or selling something, probably both.

A better approach is to say, “We’ll run tests to see where we are, monitor changes and adjust based on what we learn.”

Be upfront about challenges like data privacy, and make it clear this is a new, fast-changing industry. There are no guarantees. This isn’t hedging, it’s realistic, evidence-based marketing.

3) Start with an audit before you promise anything

Before you promise uplifts, do what marketing has always done in the face of chaos. Audit the mess.

There are tools out there for benchmarking AI visibility and sources, for example, Peec AI, Profound, SEMrush AIO, and others. None are perfect because a lot of AI behaviour is private, personalised, or not consistently traceable. But consistent benchmark data is what stops GEO from becoming vibes-based marketing.

In a solid audit, you want to understand:

1. Current visibility for your priority prompts
2. Share of voice vs competitors
3. When you appear (if at all) in citations or recommendations
4. Which sources are being used to answer your  questions
5. What competitors are doing that you are not

An audit will show you the gap between where you are now and your boss’s goals. It will also help you uncover your top priorities and create a plan for what to do next. It’s easy for someone to say, “I want GEO to bring me leads.” If lead gen is the goal, you’ll want your brand to be mentioned when users are evaluating products vs competitors, e.g.,“What are the best software for…”, “How does product X compare with product y”, etc. If your brand or products don’t currently appear in any of the sources AIs use, your job will be to change that. Stuff like product reviews, product test data and product comparisons…and won’t happen overnight! At the very least, having access to this data at your fingertips is also where you save your future self when someone asks, “What did we get for this GEO thing?”

4) Spend time up front on prompts. Garbage in, garbage out.

The old adage of “fail to prepare, then prepare to fail” applies here. Putting work into the boring stuff upfront matters with AI. Prompts are a curated set of questions/ queries that you think buyers are typing into AI models or search engines. You want prompts that map to your sales funnel.  The prompts you want to own. Since you are likely to be measuring everything against these prompts, it’s absolutely worth the effort to get this right! And to keep revising them.

Prompts where your brand name, messaging or content has a realistic shot of influencing AI answers. If you are a new player competing against Apple, you don’t want one of your prompts to be “Who are the top Apple competitors for X service?” Unless there are loads of third-party evidence on the net to back you up, you’ll be banging your head against a wall. If you track random or unrealistic prompts, you’ll get random data and disappointing results that you’ll have to sheepishly explain to the board each month.

A better approach is to start with around 50 prompts per country, not 500 prompts you’ll never look at. A useful split is:

• 80% non-branded prompts (category, challenges, use cases, “how do I…”, “what’s the difference between…”, best vendors”, “top platforms”)
• 20% branded prompts (your brand, your brand vs competitors)

Why? Because people use AI to understand problems long before they search for vendors. If you only track vendor comparison prompts, you are measuring the final weeks of a 6-month+ sales cycle.

5) Map prompts to the buying journey, not to your internal org chart

Most brands organize content around internal teams and product lines. The problem with this is buyers do not care about that. They care about their problem, their risk, their boss, and their deadlines.

So take your 50 GEO prompts and map them to a sales cycle :

• Awareness: “What is X, why does it matter?”
• Consideration: “How do I choose X type of products, what are the trade-offs?”
• Decision: “Compare A vs B, best options for my business.”
• Post-purchase: “Implementation pitfalls, governance, integration.”

You can then analyze the prompts to spot where you are invisible and which content or third-party sources need work at each stage.

6) Hone in on the sources that matter to AI in your brand

Sources (or citations) are the places AIs go on the internet to find answers to questions. If you took a glance at your LinkedIn or TikTok feed, you’ll be forgiven for thinking “the only sources that matter for GEO are Reddit, Wikipedia or Facebook.” However, one-size-fits-all advice is usually a confession that someone hasn’t properly examined your category. AI models lean on sources they can access quickly and trust. But only an audit will really uncover what’s right for your brand. Sure, there are definitely patterns that tend to crop up again and again, like AI’s preference for high-domain-authority sources (websites that rank highly in search engines); other sources could get a look in too. These include:

1. Your company website – especially if the prompt asks a question about your brand or products
2. Third-party reviews and directories (G2, Trustpilot, Clutch)
3. Reputable media and analyst-style content (national media and high domain authority trade media that the AI can access through deals or where paywalls don’t block access)
4. Community and user-generated content (YouTube, Reddit, Quora, forums)
5. Professional identity platforms (especially LinkedIn for b2b audiences)
6. Reference sites and association sites (Wikipedia, trade associations)

And sure, a lovely list of sources all brands should target would be grand. But for every brand, those sources vary for many factors, like prompt type, geography, industry, your audience, and the size of your brand.

Again, tools like Peec AI and Profound help here by breaking down the sources used by AIs (for you and your competitors) at the prompt level and at each stage of the sales journey.

7) Use third-party presence like a grown-up, not like a spam goblin

One positive about AI is that it finally helps PR and marketing to stop pretending they’re separate species.

Third-party endorsement and UGC is a key trust factor for AIs. If AI tools use directories, review platforms and reputable media as sources then your job isn’t to ignore them and scream louder on your own website. Your job is to build third-party validation because it matters to AIs.

That means strengthening profiles on relevant directories, keeping them accurate and regularly updated, not the neglected profile you set up in 2021 and never looked at again. It also means actively seeking and earning good reviews – not just for SaaS brands but hardware, software and the brand overall. It also means building credible third-party media coverage and thought leadership, the kind that shows expertise rather than “we have opinions about trends”. And PR in its broadest sense, so not just media relations, showing up and communicating in the professional spaces where your buyers actually spend time, especially LinkedIn, communities,  online events, webinars, and industry conversations.

It’s building a public presence that’s hard to ignore and harder to dismiss as marketing fluff.

8) Get your website content updated, then strategically better

Here’s the mildly comforting bit: there’s a lot of overlap between SEO and GEO. So no, you don’t need to throw your entire website into a bin and start again. Your site is still likely to be one of the first places AI systems will go when they want something that looks “official”, like what you do, who you do it for, how you’re different and whether you’re making any wild claims you can’t back up.

Start by finding out which of your website pages the AI models tend to use most. Your AI visibility tool should help you spot this. You’re not searching for divine truth, you’re looking for a shortlist and a pattern.

Once you’ve got those pages, it’s time for the unsexy work that actually moves the needle. Keep key pages and product information up to date, because AI tools are extremely talented at repeating outdated messaging like a 1970s pub landlord. Tighten up your structure too. Clear headings and subheadings help humans scan but they also help machines understand what the page is about. Try to use the phrases buyers actually use when they describe the problem, not the ones your internal teams invented. So if your customers say “risk management” and you insist on “resilience enablement framework” you are making life harder for everyone, including yourself.

Also, make sure each page has a job, and does it properly. Is it meant to answer a buyer’s question? Establish thought leadership? Support evaluation? Handle objections? If a page doesn’t know what it’s for, the model won’t either and you’ll end up with a confused blob of content that tries to do everything but doesn’t.

Then add the trust signals because just like SEO, trust in content matters to AIs. A key trick for AI is to show content freshness. “Best AI tools in 2026” is a clearer signal than “Best AI tools”. Also, aim to use named authors, not anonymous “Team Marketing” bylines that scream “written by committee.” Where possible, bring in credible third-party quotes from customers, partners, or independent experts because AI systems (and humans) tend to trust things that aren’t entirely self-referential. And make sure you use up-to-date stats and cite their sources so AIs and humans can verify them.

9) Build website FAQ and pillar content for humans, and enjoy the GEO side effects

FAQ pages and pillar content are boring in the same way that your parents telling you to eat your vegetables is boring. Annoyingly, they work.

For GEO, FAQ-style content tends to punch above its weight because it matches how people actually use AI tools: they ask full questions.

A good move is to build one genuinely valuable FAQ page that covers all the key questions buyers ask repeatedly (not the ones you wish they asked). Your sales and customer service teams can help here. Keep the answers short, specific and properly helpful, not the usual “it depends, speak to sales” filler. Then link out to more detailed pages, so the FAQ page becomes the gateway to other pages on your site.

One SEO vs GEO nuance worth calling out, a single landing page devoted to one question can work brilliantly for SEO, especially if it’s tightly optimized around that keyword and intent. For GEO, it’s often the opposite. Comprehensive content hubs can perform better because they cover variations of how people phrase questions and AI tools love a page that answers “the whole cluster” in one place. So yes, you probably need both, which is annoying but also strategically sound.

10) Make your website crawlable, structured and easy to quote

This is the bit where you make friends with your web and technical SEO people. Bring snacks and talk about the unglamorous foundations that determine whether your content is actually usable. Start with improving page performance and page load speed because AIs have only seconds to retrieve information, so it ain’t gonna hang around while your page loads. Then make sure the site is crawlable for bots and indeed AI agents because if it can’t be accessed and understood reliably, it can’t be used reliably. This means adding schema markup where relevant (FAQ, article, product, organisation) so the structure is explicit rather than implied. Tighten internal linking so what you mean is clear and ensure relevant pages are linked together instead of floating around looking all disconnected.

On-page cues help too. Use the main prompt question as a heading or subheading. Then put a direct, succinct answer near the top so the page is immediately useful. Where you can, reflect the question language in your meta descriptions because it’s another small signal that this page answers a specific query, not just “vaguely gestures at a topic”.

None of this is glamorous. But a clean structure is often the difference between your content being used or being politely ignored, while Reddit takes the spotlight again.

11) Be careful with “gaming it”, it works, but it gets ethically messy

You can absolutely create content that quickly boosts AI visibility. Adding a comparison page like “top X products” or “best Y platforms”  where you compare your brand vs your competitors often perform well because they map neatly to high-intent prompts. AI tools love “ranked lists” and “best of” content because they match how users ask questions when they’re close to making a decision.

But just because they improve AI visibility, should you still do it? The reader knows the page will show a bunch of copy about how brilliant you are followed by sub-standard reviews of competitors. It’s easy to drift into self-serving territory. And once you lose trust, you don’t win it back easily.

We built a “top B2B marketing agencies” comparison page that noticeably boosted AI visibility, then dropped it because it felt off. It worked but it also felt like we were grading our own homework and handing it in with a straight face. Similar tactics, like brands nudging discussions in sub-Reddits about themselves, can also “work”, but now you’re basically doing reputation jenga with real ethical trade-offs.

My rule of thumb is simple: if you feel dodgy or embarrassed explaining the tactic to friends and peers, don’t do it.

12) Don’t put all your marketing and PR eggs in the GEO basket

Despite the marketing world and its relatives banging on about GEO and AI visibility, the future is not “AI replaces everything”. The future is “buyers use more tools, in messier combinations”.

Yes, we are in a world of zero-click behaviour. People will take an answer from an AI model like it was delivered from on high, without clicking a link, checking sources, or reading your lovely website. That’s reality and it will get more common.

But AI isn’t the only way people will find you. Search engines still matter (approx 90% of searches still start there), social media still matters (people engage with people), the media still matters (incidentally, all of these are also sources AI use too.) Paid advertising still matters. Email still matters. Building your own communities still matters. Events still matter…you get the gist! And your boss will still ask what worked there too because no executive has ever said “don’t worry about pipeline, we’re famous in ChatGPT”.

So don’t pitch GEO as a replacement for everything you do. Pitch it as a new visibility opportunity that sits alongside and interacts with your existing channels. If you treat it like part of a blended marketing and comms mix, you’ll look a lot more strategic, and what’s more, you’ll sleep better.

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Bonus reality check: sources shift over time, so track patterns, not single wins

One of the most important things to tell your boss: GEO is not a set-and-forget play.

In our testing, we saw sources shift. Early on, Reddit and Wikipedia showed up a lot. More recently, citation patterns changed. In one snapshot, the mix looked roughly like:

• Website content (about 25%)
• LinkedIn (about 15%)
• Directories like Clutch (about 10%)
• Media publications and Reddit (around 8%)

The exact blend varies by type of prompt but the pattern is consistent: you win by being present in the places AI trusts, and by keeping your own house in order.

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So if your boss asks for a GEO strategy, don’t promise the moon, promise a method: audit, prompts, sources, content fixes, third-party footprint, then test and iterate. Do that consistently and you won’t just look good in the next meeting, you’ll build a system that still works when the next acronym lands and everyone pretends they always knew what it meant.

Ready for a GEO audit? We’re running a free GEO visibility audit for a small number of growing B2B tech companies. Click here!