You've Been Tasked with GEO Strategy. Here's What to Do First.

Someone at your company decided GEO needs to happen. And for whatever reason, you’re the someone tasked with making it happen. We hear this from customers all the time.

You know content. You probably know SEO. GEO feels adjacent to both — but most guides you'll find are either too basic ("here's what a generative engine is") or too advanced ("here's how to restructure your content architecture for retrieval optimization"). Neither tells you what to do this week to start getting cited by AI search.

This guide does. It walks you through three steps using Frase's free tools (no account needed) to establish where you stand, then giving you a clear first week of work. No specialist required. It’s the free-to-use, tried, and tested guidance I give to customers all the time.

Step 1: Find Out If You're Actually Being Cited

Before you change anything, you need to know whether you have a problem — and what kind.

Action: Run the free AI visibility check

Go to Frase's free AI visibility checker. Enter your domain. You'll get an instant read on how visible your brand is across AI platforms — no account needed.

Then open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Search for three to five category-level questions your customers would ask when evaluating a product like yours. Not branded queries — the category questions. "What's the best [tool type] for [use case]." "How do I [solve the problem your product solves]."

What you're diagnosing:

You're not appearing at all → visibility gap. Your content isn't structured for AI citation yet.
You're appearing, but competitors appear more prominently → positioning gap. You're in the index, just not winning the right queries.
You're appearing consistently → solid baseline. Focus shifts to expanding coverage and defending what you have.

These need different responses. Diagnosing which one you have first saves weeks of effort spent fixing the wrong thing. Plus, seeing which competitors appear can give good information on who is doing GEO well.

Step 2: Score Your Key Pages

Now you know whether you have a gap. The next step is understanding where it lives.

Action: Run your top five pages through the free GEO scorer

Go to Frase's free GEO score checker. Enter the URLs of your five most important pages — the ones most relevant to the queries you just tested. You'll get a score out of 100 for each, based on structure, answer-readiness, and citation potential. No account needed.

What your score means:

Score | What it means | What to do

75–100 | Strong citation-readiness | Monitor; look for coverage gaps rather than structural fixes

50–74 | Moderate — structural improvements likely needed | Prioritise: direct-answer openings, FAQ sections, data specificity

Below 50 | Significant gaps | Start here — these pages need structural work before they'll be cited reliably

What the score is actually measuring:

Does the page open with a direct answer to its main question? Are subheadings framed as questions?
Does it include FAQ blocks, numbered steps, or clear list sections?
Does it contain specific data, named tools, or concrete outcomes — rather than vague claims?

A page scoring below 50 that already ranks well on Google is your best first target. The authority exists — the structure is what needs fixing.

Step 3: Understand Why You're Not Appearing

With your scores in hand, you can diagnose the root cause. The most common reasons content teams aren't getting cited by AI:

The content doesn't answer the question directly.
AI engines cite content that gives a clear answer early. If your content buries the answer in paragraph four, it gets skipped.

The content lacks specifics.
Vague claims ("a comprehensive solution for your needs") are almost never cited. Specific ones ("reduces research time by three hours per article") are. AI prefers content with data, named tools, and concrete outcomes.

The content is structured for reading, not extraction.
Long flowing paragraphs are harder for AI to parse than structured sections with clear headings, FAQ blocks, and numbered steps. Here's what the difference looks like:

Before (structured for reading): "At Acme, we help content teams work more effectively. Our platform brings together research, writing, and optimization in one place, which makes the whole process smoother and helps teams get more done."

After (structured for extraction): "Acme is a content optimization platform. It combines keyword research, AI writing, and on-page optimization in one workflow — designed for content teams that publish more than ten articles a month."

The second version opens with a direct answer, names specific capabilities, and gives enough context that an AI can quote it as a complete response. The first version makes sense in context but is almost impossible to cite in isolation.

Research published at KDD 2024 by Princeton University and IIT Delhi found that targeted structural improvements can boost AI visibility by up to 40% — with direct-answer structure, data density, and authoritative citations among the strongest predictors.

Your Week-One Plan

You have a baseline. Here's how to use it.

Day 1–2: Complete the audit

Run the AI visibility check and note your current citation status
Score your top five pages with the GEO score checker
Run your five queries in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — note who's appearing where

Day 3–4: Pick your first fix

Look for a page that:

Already ranks on Google (authority exists)
Targets a query where a competitor is getting cited instead of you
Scores between 40–60 on the GEO scorer

That's your first project. A page with existing authority that needs structural improvements — not a full rewrite — is the fastest path to a measurable result.

Day 5: Make the fix and record the baseline

Apply the structural improvements:

Add a direct-answer opening paragraph
Reframe subheadings as questions where it makes sense
Add a FAQ block or numbered steps section
Include a key takeaways section
Replace vague claims with specific data or outcomes

Note the GEO score before and after (you can do this using Frase’s free GEO score checker shared above, or with a 1 week free trial account). Record which queries you're testing. GEO results don't move overnight — your week-one goal isn't a visible improvement in citations. It's a clear baseline and one fix in progress. The data you record now is what lets you show progress in a month.

What to Track From Day One

Start simple. Three things:

Manual citation checks. Run your five queries weekly in ChatGPT and Perplexity. You'll notice changes before any tool tells you about them.

GEO score by page. Track scores for the pages you're actively working on. You want to see whether structural fixes are moving the score before citations visibly shift.

AI visibility tracking. Once you have a manual baseline, Frase's AI visibility tracking automates citation monitoring across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and more. Use your five audit queries as your starter prompt library — that's enough to show meaningful signal without being overwhelming.

The goal in month one isn't a dramatic improvement in citations. It's knowing your baseline, understanding what you changed, and having enough data to continue the work.

Where to Go From Here

Once you have a baseline and a first fix in progress:

Go deeper on structure: The complete GEO playbook covers platform-specific tactics for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, schema markup, third-party authority signals, and a full measurement framework.
Understand your GEO score in depth: GEO scoring in Frase breaks down each dimension of the score and exactly what moves it.
Understand the broader picture: What is GEO gives a deeper understanding of all things AI search — useful once you're past the first week.

The workflow you're building toward looks like this: track prompts → identify where competitors are winning → update content → re-check citations → repeat. Once you understand your baseline, you can use Frase to run this automatically at scale — monitoring for content decay, queuing fixes, re-publishing when something slips. But for now five queries, five pages, and one fix is the right place to start. Our team is here to help if you get stuck at any point.

FAQs

How long does it take to see results from GEO optimization?

Longer than SEO, generally. The citation indexes AI engines use update on their own schedules, and there's no equivalent of requesting a recrawl. Structural improvements can start to show in manual citation checks within four to eight weeks. Meaningful shifts in share of voice typically take two to three months. Track your baseline from day one so you have something to compare against.

Do I need to be an SEO expert to do GEO?

No — but SEO experience helps. The elements that improve AI citation (clear headings, direct answers, data density, schema markup) overlap significantly with good SEO practice. The main adjustment is writing for extractability: structuring content so a specific sentence or paragraph can be quoted as a complete answer, rather than relying on surrounding context to make it make sense.

Should I optimise for GEO or SEO first?

Both where possible — they're more complementary than competitive. Content that gets cited by AI (comprehensive, structured, data-rich, authoritative) also tends to perform well on Google. Start with structural fundamentals that serve both, then layer in GEO-specific improvements (FAQ sections, direct-answer openings, specific data points) once the baseline is solid.

What's the difference between GEO and AEO?

The terms are often used interchangeably. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) refer to the same practice: optimising content to be cited by AI-powered search and answer tools. Some teams use AEO to refer specifically to voice search or featured snippet optimisation, but in practice the strategies are largely the same. Use whichever term your organisation recognises.

Key Takeaway: Start Here

Two actions, free, no account needed:

Check your AI visibility — see how your brand appears across AI platforms right now
Score your top five pages — get a concrete starting point and know exactly what to fix first

When you're ready to monitor citations automatically and run the optimisation loop at scale: start your free Frase trial.