Frequently asked question · SEO & Content
How is GEO different from the SEO we already do?
SEO earns a position on a results page. GEO earns a citation inside a generated answer. The engines read the same site, but they pick sources differently: a direct answer in the first paragraph, first-hand detail, freshness, and access for their crawlers count for more than link equity. Most of what you ship for SEO still helps. GEO adds the measurement your stack does not have: mention rate, citations, and share of voice per engine, plus the fixes and content that move them.
What the engines do with the same site
A results page rewards a page for ranking; a generated answer rewards it for being quotable. The engines answer in full and cite three to six sources, and the click, if any, goes to those. They read your robots.txt exactly as written, so one stray disallow takes you out of ChatGPT no matter how the page ranks. They answer prompts nobody types into Google, and they cite the page that answers the question first, in its first paragraph, rather than the one with the most links pointing at it.
That is how a pillar page with depth and backlinks loses to a Reddit thread, a YouTube review, or a competitor's comparison table. Those sources have first-hand detail and a direct answer, and the engine trusts them for that.
What your stack cannot see
Search Console, GA4, and the rank tracker report clicks, impressions, and positions. Crawl stats cover Googlebot; GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are invisible. Backlink tools show who links to you, not which pages the engines cite. None of them says whether ChatGPT cited your page yesterday, or for which prompt.
What GEO adds on top
The audit checks each URL for the 21 things that decide whether a page can be retrieved and cited: crawler access for 20 AI bots, llms.txt, sitemap, canonicals, heading hierarchy, content depth, server-rendered text against a client-side shell, structured data. The daily runs put your buyers' questions to every major engine and keep every answer with its sources. The reporting turns that into mention rate, citations, position score, and share of voice per engine, next to the rankings you already have.
Answered on
SEO & Content
For SEO and content leads: how each AI engine reads your site, which pages and sources it cites, share of voice next to rankings, and a fix list per template.
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