What GEO is not
GEO is not a secret HTML attribute, a directory submission ritual, or a reason to stuff “as an AI language model” into your copy. Answer engines pull from pages that state facts clearly, show who wrote them, and keep dates honest.
If your SEO fundamentals are broken (crawl waste, soft 404s, cannibalised URLs), GEO work on top is decoration. Fix retrieval first.
Answer blocks that stand alone
Put a direct answer near the top of pages that target a question. The paragraph should make sense with no surrounding marketing. That is the passage most likely to be lifted into an answer.
Then support it. Definitions, steps, limits, and “when this does not apply” reduce the chance you get quoted out of context.
Write like someone will paste three sentences into a brief. Because they will.
Structure machines can parse
Headings should describe sections, not tease them. Lists should be real lists. Tables should be tables when you compare options. Fake styling that looks like structure but is a soup of divs helps no one.
One idea per section beats a thousand-word scroll with no anchors. People skim. So do systems that assemble answers.
Trust signals that travel
Name the author. Show a real review date. Link to primary evidence when you claim a method. Keep organisation details consistent across the site so you resolve to one entity, not three spellings of the company name.
Invented statistics and vague “studies show” lines are liabilities. If you cannot defend a number on a sales call, delete it.
Measure without fantasy
Track citations and assisted traffic where you can see them, plus classic search performance. Do not promise a dashboard that attributes every AI answer to a single pageview. The channel is messier than that.
GEO done properly looks boring from the outside: clearer pages, fewer contradictions, better information architecture. Boring is fine. Quotable is the point.