Looking to improve your GEO visibility? Here are six practical steps you can take. 

Generative search has changed how buyers are doing their research when it comes to making purchasing decisions. 

Decision-makers are no longer just searching. They’re asking LLMs such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity who to trust, who to shortlist and who to avoid. The result? Brands need to work even harder to ensure that the information LLMs come back with is accurate, positive and credible. 

That’s where Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) comes in. Not as a nice-to-have but as a strategic visibility and credibility challenge for marketing and comms leaders.

If your brand isn’t showing up accurately, confidently and consistently in AI answers, here are six steps you can take now to start improving your GEO performance.

1. Get ruthless about content consistency

LLMs reward clarity. Conflicting messages confuse them.

Start by auditing your owned content: website pages, blogs, leadership profiles, FAQs and press materials. Look for inconsistencies in how you describe what you do, who you serve and why you matter.

Then create a single source of truth. A central content hub with approved facts, data points, quotes and positioning that all teams can pull from. This doesn’t just help humans stay aligned. It signals reliability to AI systems trained to spot patterns and repetition.

2. Make your site easier for AI to understand, not just humans

LLMs don’t browse like people do. They extract, summarise and synthesise.

That means structure matters. Prioritise clear headings, bullet points, lists and short explanatory sections. If a page reads like an answer to a question, it’s more likely to be used as one by LLMs.

FAQs are particularly powerful. Reframing key content into question-and-answer formats mirrors how prompts are written and how AI surfaces information.

3. Use schema markup and LLM.txt to signpost what matters

Think of this as labelling your best work.

Schema markup helps AI understand what a page is about, whether that’s a product, an organisation, an article or a leadership profile. It reduces ambiguity and increases the chance of accurate representation.

LLM.txt works in a similar way to robots.txt, but for generative models. It tells AI crawlers where your most authoritative, up-to-date content lives. Used well, it directs attention to the pages you actually want cited.

4. Invest in advocacy that AI trusts

LLMs place heavy weight on third-party validation.

That includes industry experts, analysts, credible influencers, awards and recognised bodies. If respected voices talk about you, cite your data or quote your leaders, that signal travels far beyond the original placement.

This is also where analyst relations and high-quality thought leadership placements earn their keep again. Advocacy isn’t a nice-to-have in GEO. It’s a multiplier.

5. Actively amplify your strongest assets

Good content doesn’t work hard enough on its own.

Once you’ve created well-structured, authoritative material, extend its reach. Repurpose earned coverage. Turn long-form thinking into video, audio or visual summaries. Share consistently across owned channels.

LLMs favour information that appears across multiple credible contexts. Repetition across formats reinforces authority, not fatigue.

6. Prioritise the sources AI already trusts

Not all coverage is equal in GEO.

Editorial media, especially top-tier and specialist trade publications, carry disproportionate weight in generative answers. Mentions and citations often matter more than backlinks.

Support campaigns with LLM-friendly newswire distribution. Be selective with paid placements, focusing on publications with strong semantic relevance and audience trust.

In GEO, being quoted in the right places beats being everywhere. 

Why does this matter now? 

GEO is still in relative infancy. While the majority of businesses are now using generative AI in some form, there is evidence to suggest that there are very few brands that are actually optimising for how they appear in LLM searches.

MuckRack’s ‘What is AI reading?’ found that the vast majority of brands have limited influence over how they appear in AI answers. Ultimately, this means that there is an opportunity for brands to get ahead of the competition by becoming first-adopters of GEO, while failure to start optimising now may mean falling behind your competitors in the long run.