Get your site cited by the answer, not buried under it.

Why this changed

Search is now three overlapping jobs, not one. Classic SEO still wins the clicks that exist. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) gets you cited inside AI answers. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) structures a page so it becomes the single extracted answer. You optimize all three at once — and Google's first official generative-AI guide (May 15, 2026) says optimizing for its AI features is just SEO — no special files, no AI markup, no separate schema — a useful antidote to vendor hype.

The numbers that define the moment (directional, sourced mid-2026, shelf life of months — re-verify before betting a budget):

• 68%of US Google searches ended without a click in early 2026 (SparkToro/Similarweb, Jan–Apr) — rising to ~83% when an AI Overview is present and ~93% inside AI Mode. Being cited now matters more than being merely ranked.
• 20%+of Google queries trigger an AI Overview (Ahrefs trigger data; other panels measure 15–25% — methodology moves the number, so always check how a figure was measured).
• ~82%of AI citations trace to earned media — third-party pages, not your own site (Muck Rack, 1M+ citations). Brand mentions correlate roughly 3× more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks (Ahrefs, 75,000 brands).
• 11%of domains are cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity — and AI Overviews vs AI Mode share URLs only ~14% of the time. Different ecosystems: measure and optimize per platform.
• ~1%of site visits come from AI referrals today (ChatGPT ~87% of them) — but they convert several multiples better in most 2026 studies. High value, low volume: plan for quality, not flood.

The one model everything hangs on

AI answer engines look for agreement across independent sources before they cite you. If the same true facts about you appear on your site, on Reddit, in a "best of" listicle, in a review, and in a YouTube video, the model gets confident and names you. If you exist only on your own domain, it treats your claims skeptically and recommends someone with a broader footprint. Everything in the five phases serves that one idea. It's research-backed, too: a 2025 University of Toronto study found AI search overwhelmingly favors earned, third-party sources over brand-owned content, and the founding Princeton GEO study measured visibility lifts of up to 40% from adding statistics, quotations, and cited sources.

The workflow, in five phases

Run them in order. Each links to a full page with the exact Claude prompts.

Why use Claude for this specifically

Because every phase is a task Claude does well against your actual files, not in the abstract. It can read a page and rewrite the first 200 words into a self-contained answer; generate valid JSON-LD and an llms.txt from your sitemap; diff your robots.txt against the current crawler list; draft an entity fact sheet you reuse everywhere; and score a batch of AI answers for whether your brand shows up. Keep your brand facts in a Project so every prompt starts from the same source of truth, and use Claude Code when you want it editing the site files directly.

Free, and the whole method

Everything here is free and complete: the full five-phase method, the 3,307-question dataset with a downloadable CSV, a working checker, and every prompt — no signup, no email wall, no "book a demo." That is deliberate. Much of the paid GEO market sells llms.txt packages, schema audits, and guaranteed-citation retainers — and this site's own guides show, with evidence, that those are not the levers that get you cited. The actual method is learnable, so we wrote it down and gave it away. If you are weighing whether to do this yourself or pay someone, we made an honest map of exactly when paying is worth it: DIY vs a paid GEO service.

Guides & references

Deeper dives on the terms, the platform differences, and the tooling — the questions people search most.

The agentic web: what to prepare for next

Where AI search is heading — browsers that act on pages, checkout inside the chat, crawlers you can license, and provenance labels in results. Six guides to get ahead of it.

If you forget everything else

1. SEO + GEO, not SEO vs GEO. Strong classic SEO is the foundation AI visibility is built on.
2. AI search is a consensus engine that prefers earned media. Get the same true story onto multiple trusted, independent surfaces.
3. Fact density plus information gain wins. Statistics, citations, expert quotes, and something original on every page. Rehashing the top three results earns nothing.
4. Front-load the answer. First ~200 words, self-contained, carrying a number or a named entity.
5. Challengers can win here. Lower-ranked pages gain the most, and AI citations have partly decoupled from the top-10 — you leapfrog by being more citable, not just bigger.