How to Do Generative Engine Optimization: 7 Actionable Steps

To do generative engine optimization, work through seven steps in order: measure where AI engines place your brand today, make sure their crawlers can reach you, state plainly who you are, write answer-first pages, earn mentions on third-party sites, then track results and repeat. Each step fixes a different reason a brand is missing from AI answers.

This is the sequence for a first GEO project. If you want the list of individual tactics instead, read the nine GEO strategies; for the problems beginners hit along the way, see the common GEO challenges.

What do you need before you start?

Three things: a list of 20 to 30 prompts your buyers would really type, access to your robots.txt and CDN settings, and an owner for the work. Prompts should read like a person talking to an assistant (“best project tool for a remote design team under 15 euros per user”), not like keywords.

Step	Question it answers	Time
1. Audit	Where do we stand?	1 to 2 hours
2. Access	Can AI crawlers read us?	1 hour
3. Identity	Do engines know what we are?	2 hours
4. Content	Do our pages answer the prompts?	Ongoing
5. Mentions	Do others vouch for us?	Ongoing
6. Technical polish	Is the evidence machine-readable?	Half a day
7. Measure	Is it working?	Weekly

Step 1: How do you audit your AI visibility?

Run your prompts across several engines and write down three things per answer: which brands were named, which sources were cited, and how your brand was described. Use a logged-out browser or fresh session so personalisation does not skew the result.

Do this on at least ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, because each retrieves differently. One run is a sample, not a verdict: answers change between runs. For a baseline you can trust, repeat each prompt several times or use a tracker. GeoGen runs your prompts daily and reports the share of answers mentioning you (visibility), average position, citations and sentiment across 16 engines, and the first data appears within minutes of adding a brand. The free GEO audit tool is the quickest place to start.

Step 2: How do you let AI crawlers read your site?

Open your robots.txt and check that you are not blocking the AI search bots. OpenAI documents that OAI-SearchBot is what surfaces sites in ChatGPT search, and that opted-out sites will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. GPTBot, by contrast, relates to model training and is a separate decision. Changes can take about 24 hours to apply.

Then check what the crawler actually receives:

1. Fetch key pages with JavaScript disabled; prices, specs and FAQs should still be there.
2. Look for firewall or CDN rules returning 403 to unknown bots.
3. Confirm important pages are indexable and in your sitemap.

Google says that to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, with no additional requirements. Details per bot are in our AI crawler guide.

Step 3: How do you tell engines who you are?

Write one literal sentence describing your brand and use it everywhere: “[Company] provides [product] for [audience].” Put it on your homepage, About page, LinkedIn, directory listings and press boilerplate.

Check that names, product tiers and prices match on every page and third-party profile. If an engine has to reconcile conflicting descriptions, it either hedges or picks the wrong one. Add Organization structured data if you can; it helps clarity even though Google confirms it is not required.

Step 4: How do you write pages AI can quote?

Build one page per important prompt and open each section with a direct answer of 40 to 70 words. Add evidence after the answer, not before it.

• Use question headings and short sections that make sense alone.
• Put comparisons in tables with a “best for” column.
• Include dated facts, prices, limits and honest downsides.
• Cover the sub-questions an engine searches for while answering (its query fan-outs): pricing, alternatives, who it is not for.

The Princeton paper that introduced GEO reported that adding citations, quotations and statistics lifted visibility by up to 40% in its test setting, which is a reason to add real, sourced facts, not a guarantee of results.

Step 5: How do you earn mentions on other sites?

Look at the citations in your audit. They show exactly which articles, review sites, forums and videos the engines trust for your topic. Then contribute to those pages: send authors an accurate update with specifics, answer questions in cited communities with a disclosed affiliation, and publish evidence worth quoting.

In GeoGen’s hosting-industry study, covering 2,000+ non-branded prompts across six engines, the five most-cited sources accounted for roughly 45% of citations and Reddit led at 11%. Third parties dominate what engines cite, which is why this step usually decides the outcome. The full tactic guide to getting cited goes deeper.

Step 6: What technical polish helps?

Add structured data for what is true on the page: Organization, Product, FAQ where you really have FAQs. Publish clean titles, descriptions and a sitemap. Keep pricing and specs in HTML tables.

Treat llms.txt as optional. It is cheap to create with the free llms.txt generator, but no major engine has documented relying on it, so do not expect a visibility change from it alone.

Step 7: How do you measure and repeat?

Review your tracked prompts weekly and plan monthly. Watch visibility trend, citations won and lost, competitor movement and sentiment. Add three to five new prompts each month and retire ones that never matter.

When a page you shipped appears among the citations for its prompt, that is the cleanest proof a step worked. When nothing moves after a month, return to step 2 or 3 before writing more content. The metrics worth tracking are explained in GEO success metrics, and the whole routine is laid out in the GeoGen playbook.

What mistakes slow beginners down?

Writing before auditing, blocking crawlers by accident, chasing one engine, and judging results from a single answer. A related list of fixes lives in the GEO strategy hub.