Most teams "do GEO" by guessing.
They rewrite a page, hope an AI engine notices, and never check whether it worked. This playbook replaces that with a measured loop you can run every month.
Generative engine optimization is a process, not a one-time edit. The steps below take you from not knowing whether AI engines cite you to a repeatable workflow that earns citations and proves it. For the concepts behind why this works, see our complete guide to GEO.
What does doing GEO actually involve?
Doing GEO means making your content the easiest, most credible thing for an AI engine to cite, then measuring whether it worked. In practice that is six repeating steps: baseline your visibility, fix crawlability, structure content for retrieval, make it citation-worthy, keep it fresh, and measure share of voice. None of it is exotic. The discipline is in running the loop, not the side-project version most teams attempt.
Before you change anything, find out where you stand. Pick the 20 to 50 prompts your buyers actually ask AI, run them across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, and record whether you are mentioned, cited, and how you are framed. That baseline is what every later change is measured against.
Check your robots.txt and your CDN. Many sites block AI crawlers without realizing it, and some platforms changed their defaults to block AI bots automatically. If the engines cannot fetch your pages, nothing else you do matters.
Lead with the answer. The first 150 to 200 words of a page carry disproportionate weight when an AI engine summarizes it, so the opening should answer the query directly rather than build up to it. Open with a clean definitional sentence in the pattern "[Entity] is a [category] that [differentiator]," which retrieval systems strongly prefer.
AI engines pattern-match headers to queries. A header that reads "What is GEO?" gets cited for "what is generative engine optimization" more often than "GEO overview." Rewriting headers as the real questions buyers ask is one of the highest-ROI changes you can make to existing content.
AI models favor specific, attributable facts. "AI campaigns deliver 20 to 30% higher ROI" gets cited far more than "AI improves results." Add named data, original research, and expert quotes with attribution. These are citation magnets for AI engines and backlink magnets for traditional SEO at the same time.
AI engines weigh recency, so a 2024 guide with no updates loses ground to a current one. Refresh cornerstone pages, add new data, and show a clear last-updated date. Then re-run your prompt set monthly and track the trend. GEO lives at the intersection of content, SEO, and digital PR, so make it a standing workflow, not a one-off.
How do you measure GEO progress?
Measure citation frequency, brand visibility, and AI share of voice across engines, not clicks and CTR. Those old metrics lose meaning when the answer happens on the results page. Re-run your baseline prompt set on a schedule and watch whether your citation share is trending up against named competitors, per engine.
Measuring by hand does not scale past a few prompts. MentionsAPI runs your full prompt set across every engine in one call and returns mentions, citations, sentiment, and rank, so the loop above is backed by data instead of guesswork. The measurement method is in our guide to AI visibility, and the citation mechanics are in our AI Overviews playbook.
Frequently asked questions
How do you do generative engine optimization?
How long does GEO take to work?
Why is my site not cited by AI engines?
What content gets cited by AI the most?
How do you measure GEO success?
Run the loop, do not run a one-off
The teams that win GEO are not the ones with the cleverest single edit. They are the ones who baseline, fix crawlability, structure for retrieval, add citable proof, keep content fresh, and re-measure every month.
Start the loop today: pull your baseline with MentionsAPI, fix the pages that should be cited and are not, and check again in 30 days.