Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the effort to appear, accurately, in answers written by AI systems. The field is young and changes quickly, so it is worth being clear about which advice is well supported and which is a guess.
What is reasonably solid
- Pages must be crawlable and indexable to be used at all.
- Clear, specific answers with named sources are easier to summarise correctly.
- Original research, data and first-hand experience give systems something worth citing.
- Consistent facts about your business across your site and profiles reduce confusion.
What is still uncertain
Which signals decide whether a page is cited differs by product and changes over time. Claims such as “add this file and be cited” are not supported by evidence from the platforms themselves.
About llms.txt
The llms.txt idea is a proposal for a plain-text summary of your key pages. It is harmless to publish and easy to generate, but it has not been confirmed as a factor in rankings or citations. Our theme can create one for you, switched off by default.
A sensible approach
- Fix technical basics and publish genuinely useful pages.
- Add something others cannot: data, examples, interviews, tools.
- Make authorship and update dates visible.
- Track referrals from AI products in analytics, and judge results by business outcomes.
