The New SEO Is Here. Are You Ready? 📚

Sources: Search Engine Land: GEO is a reputation problem → · Foundation: the GEO guide →

Everyone used to Google a brand before they bought it. Now they're asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, and AI decides which brands to recommend in a completely different way than Google ever did.

This new game has a name (Generative Engine Optimization), but you don't need the jargon. You need to do four things: audit where you stand, restructure your pages so AI can pull from them, build third-party consensus, and add the technical files almost nobody adds. This is the full playbook.

You can't fix what you can't see. Start by taking the questions your customers actually ask before buying, and running them through Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity to see if you show up.

Write down 10–50 real buying-intent questions for your category. For a clothing brand that's things like 'what are the best travel shorts for men' or 'Vuori alternatives', whatever someone types when they're about to spend money in your space. If your brand isn't in the answers, that's your real problem, and now you know exactly which questions to go win.

Here's the thing almost everyone gets wrong: AI doesn't pull whole pages, it pulls individual passages. So your pages have to be built for extraction.

· Make your headers the exact questions people ask ('What are the best travel shorts for men?').

· Put the answer in the very first sentence under each header (40–80 words), not buried below.

· Turn any pricing or comparison into a table. AI copies tables almost word for word; your paragraphs get paraphrased or skipped.

· Build comparison pages, like 'Your Brand vs. Your Biggest Competitor.' AI search loves these and not enough people make them.

· Add FAQ blocks to your key pages, each question a header, each answer short and direct.

This one is the most important and the most overlooked: AI doesn't trust what you say about yourself, it trusts what other people say about you.

There's real research showing AI looks for a consensus across multiple independent sources before it'll confidently recommend a brand, the same claim showing up repeatedly across the web. And the single most-cited source across AI answers is Reddit (it shows up in roughly 1 in 5 AI answers).

So you need to exist off your own site: in Reddit threads in your space, on review sites, in roundups, on podcasts, in YouTube videos. One genuinely good third-party mention does more for your AI visibility than ten of your own blog posts.

Most brands stop at content. The ones that win add the technical signals that tell AI what you are, and let it read you in the first place:

· Schema markup (JSON-LD): structured data on your pages (Product, FAQ, Review) that spells out your facts in a format AI and search engines parse cleanly.

· llms.txt: a simple file at your domain root that tells AI models what your brand is and which pages actually matter, like a site map written for AI. Almost nobody has one yet.

· Allow the AI crawlers: make sure your robots.txt isn't blocking the bots that feed AI answers, GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), and PerplexityBot. If they can't crawl you, you can't be cited.