Table of Contents
It Starts With the Same Foundations as Good SEO
A GEO agency isn’t running a completely separate playbook. The fundamentals, clear site structure, genuine expertise, accurate and consistent information, are the same things that have always underpinned good SEO. What changes is the lens they’re applied through. A good GEO agency looks at your existing content and asks a separate question to the ye olde, “will this rank?”, they also ask, “would an AI tool trust this enough to cite it?”Auditing How You Currently Appear in AI Tools
Before any work starts, the agency you work with should check where you already show up, which in turn should identify where you don’t. That means testing how tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews respond to questions someone might ask about your industry, your services, or your business directly, and seeing whether you’re mentioned, cited, or missing entirely.
You don’t need special tools to start this yourself. Open your Ai of choice, whether that’s ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google or whatever the next hot off the press Ai is and try prompts like:
- “Who are the best [your service] providers in [your town or city]?”
- “What should I look for when choosing a [your industry] company?”
- “Compare [your business name] with [a known competitor]”
- “What does a [your service] actually involve?”
- “Recommend a [your industry] company for [specific need, e.g. a small business website]”
Run each one a few times, since AI tools don’t always give the same answer twice. Note whether your business is mentioned at all, whether it’s cited as a source, and what it’s actually being said about you when it does come up. If a competitor keeps appearing and you don’t, that’s usually the clearest starting point for where the work needs to focus.
Structuring Content to Be Citable, Not Just Readable
A lot of GEO work comes down to how content is structured:
- Clear, direct answers near the top of a page.
- Specific facts and figures rather than vague claims.
- Proper use of schema markup, so AI tools have a clean, unambiguous way to understand what your page actually is.
This isn’t guesswork either. Researchers at Princeton and Georgia Tech, who coined the term generative engine optimisation, tested content strategies across approximately 10,000 queries and found that techniques like citing sources, using direct quotations, and including concrete statistics could lift visibility in AI-generated answers by up to 40%¹. None of this is extraordinary; it’s disciplined, deliberate content structure, something that SEO specialists should take into account at all times.
Building Genuine Topical Authority
AI tools tend to favour sources that demonstrate real depth on a subject, not just a single page that happens to mention it. If your entire GEO strategy lives on one page, an AI tool has very little evidence that you actually know the subject. Depth, shown across multiple connected pages, is what builds that trust (it occurs to us, that we sound like a broken record as we regurgitate what we’ve said about SEO all along).
In practice, this means building out proper content clusters: a group of pages that each answer a specific, related question, all linking back to a central hub page that covers the topic more broadly. We do this on our own site. Our AI Search GEO service page acts as the hub, and it’s supported by a growing set of individual articles that each answer one specific question in more depth, what GEO actually means, what a GEO agency does day to day, how AI Overviews are changing search behaviour, and so on, much like this piece will too. Each piece links back to the hub and, where relevant, sideways to the others.
A single article gives an AI tool one data point. A properly linked cluster gives it dozens, all reinforcing the same expertise from different angles.
Think of it as multiple diary entries that sum up one month. The next month would be a different topic made up of other entries. This is how multiple campaigns running at one time can work together or apart.
This is a much stronger basis for being cited as a trustworthy source than relying on one page alone.
If you’re auditing your own site for this, the questions worth asking are: is there one hub page for each core topic you want to be known for, are there supporting pages answering the specific sub-questions around it, and do they actually link to each other, or are they sitting in isolation?
Monitoring Citation, Not Just Rankings
This is one of the bigger practical differences. Traditional SEO reporting is built around rank tracking and click-through data. GEO work needs a different perspective, tracking whether and how often your content gets cited inside AI-generated answers, since that’s the outcome you’re actually optimising for, and it doesn’t always show up as a click or a ranking position. Independent research backs this up. Pew Research Center tracked real browsing behaviour across nearly 69,000 Google searches and found that when an AI summary appears, people click through to a website only around 8% of the time, compared with 15% when no summary is shown². Citation, not click-through, is increasingly the metric that actually reflects whether your content is doing its job.
We’ve written in-depth about this shift here: why traffic is no longer the right KPI for SEO, which covers what to track instead, impressions, branded search demand, SERP feature presence, and share of voice in AI generated answers, when clicks alone stop telling the full story.
We’ve seen this play out directly in our own data. Our article on whether SEO is dead genuinely reached page one of Google, and even then, it recorded a 0% click-through rate.
What it did generate was citation inside Google’s AI Overview and AI Mode features on multiple occasions. Visibility that never shows up as a click but is still a real, measurable outcome. That’s not a shortfall in the content, it’s the exact pattern the Pew Research data above describes, playing out on our own site. It’s precisely why citation tracking matters as its own metric, rather than judging a page’s performance on clicks alone.
What it Doesn’t Involve
In order to understand all of this, we first must comprehend that a GEO agency isn’t gaming AI tools, stuffing content with keywords in the hope of tricking a language model, or promising guaranteed citations. None of that holds up, and any agency claiming it should raise questions.
Genuine GEO work is directly related to traditional SEO practices, meaning it’s closer to good editorials than technical trickery, and because of the rate at which algorithm updates occur and the continuous findings that are being returned daily when it comes to how AI-generated results are returned or delivered, anyone claiming they are a genius in the field should be looked at with a hint of… scepticism. Respectfully, of course.
Where it Fits Alongside Everything Else
We don’t treat GEO as a bolt-on service separate from SEO, content, and web design. It’s an extension of the same principles, clarity, credibility, genuinely useful content, aimed at a slightly wider set of places your business needs to show up.
If your foundations are solid, a GEO agency’s job is largely about applying that same discipline to a newer set of channels.
