AI-driven search is reshaping users behavior online. Companies that adapt early and implement Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) best practices on-site and off-site will gain a powerful advantage.
In this GEO expedition guide, Obility will help you map your ascent, gather the right resources, and ascend to the top of AI-driven search results. Let’s start the climb! (Bonus: read to the end to download our GEO checklist!)
Step 1: Map Your Route
Technical Health
Technical health is the foundation of any SEO and GEO strategy. Your website will not perform if it’s riddled with technical errors. To make sure your ascent to GEO is as smooth as possible, Obility recommends performing monthly technical audits and addressing any errors in order of priority:
- 404 errors, broken links, and 302 errors
- Duplicate and missing H1s, H2s, and subsequent headers
- Page speed errors: unused code or JavaScript, unnecessary cookies, images that have not been compressed
- Duplicate and missing metadata
- Failed Core Web Vitals assessment
Bing Indexation and JavaScript
ChatGPT relies on Bing to crawl and index websites. In order to ensure your website will be referenced by ChatGPT you must make sure that Bing is not blocked by robots.txt and that your sitemap has been submitted to Bing Webmaster Tools.
In addition, AI engines have a blind spot when it comes to JavaScript. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure all priority web pages use server-side rendering and follow an HTML-first development approach.
Otherwise, if AI engines can’t properly crawl and interpret your website, they won’t be able to include it in their training data. As a result, you will be less likely to appear in AI-generated overviews, reducing its visibility and impact in AI-driven search results.
AI-Friendly Content Formatting & Schema
AI search engines favor a specific type of content structure. They look for content with schema mark-up, organized headers, bullet points, and listicles. Before you start diving deeper into GEO, we recommend auditing your existing content for opportunities to add schema markups and other AI-friendly content features.
Schema markup is particularly helpful because it helps AI search engines extract information from your website, understand semantic relationships between pages and queries, and serve them to users.
For B2B organizations, Obility’s favorite schema markups are:
- FAQ Page (AI engines particularly love this one)
- Q&A
- Video
- Organization
- Reviews
- Blog Post
- Article
- Event
- Course
- Product (for organizations who share pricing on their website)
Content Pruning
Content pruning can be overwhelming but removing old content that doesn’t fit your brand anymore will help you clear up some crawl budget and help AI search engines understand what is relevant to your audience.
Before you start it’s important to determine what your goals for content pruning are and what you consider as a valuable piece of content. Is your threshold for pruning traffic, conversions, keyword ranking, internal links, page authority, number of SERP snippets, all the above? Are your goals to reduce the number of technical errors, remove old content, free crawl budget, or combine redundant pieces?
Once you have identified your KPIs, you can move on to the analysis. What makes content pruning a longer project is often the data pulling and the manual review. To make things a little easier Obility recommends starting with removing:
- Pages that have gotten less than 10 visits from all channels in the past 12 months
- Pages with a bounce rate of over 90%
- Pages that have not gotten any conversions in the past 12 months
- Pages that don’t rank for any keywords
After that comes the manual review part where you’ll have to decide if a page should be removed, refreshed, or combined with an existing page. This is also a good time to mark which pages need to republish your most important pages since AI search engines favor recent content (more on that in step 4!).
Step 2: Gather Your Supplies
Keyword Research
The main difference between keyword research for SEO and keyword research for GEO is the intent: Obility’s most successful client in the AI space has nearly 5,000 AI overviews and 71% of their keywords are considered informational.
Obility also prioritizes a content collection approach to identify keywords and build content.
For each content collection, we identify one primary target keyword and 8-10 supporting long-tail keywords that have lower keyword difficulty and search volume. While the primary keyword can be a short-tail, highly competitive keyword, the supporting keywords are less competitive and more targeted, so we can capture both BOFU and TOFU traffic within one content collection.
A few other recommendations to keep in mind while you’re doing GEO keyword research:
- Consider the problems users are trying to solve, not how you would describe your solution
- Use question patterns and think about how users naturally phrase their queries when talking to AI
- Include context variations: how does the same need manifest in different situations or industries?
- Anticipate future questions and needs: what will users search next once you’ve answered their questions?
- Focus on informational, educational, and long-tail keywords that match bottom-of-the-funnel intent
Content Collections Mapping
Content collections are educational hubs focused on a core topic, designed to provide users with relevant information at every stage of the funnel. Content collections enhance the user experience, drive GEO growth, and make content easier to navigate and understand.
Each content collection includes a primary hub page targeting the primary keyword we discussed above, as well as subtopic pages targeting supporting long-tail keywords, related articles widgets, and links from each supporting piece back to the pillar page.
Ultimately, the goal of the collection approach is to establish thought leadership around the targeted topic and to rank in the top organic positions for short-tail, highly competitive keywords.
Content collections should be linked in a dedicated space within the site’s primary navigation menu, making it easy for users to find. As shown in the Vanta example below, the content collections are separate from the resource center.
Competitor Analysis
Just like SEO, GEO does not work in a vacuum. To be cited by AI search engines or present in AI overviews, you need to understand who and where your competitors are.
For a thorough understanding of the AI competitive landscape, Obility recommends following this 5-step process:
- Use SEMRush to get a list of your competitors’ AI overviews.
- Analyze where they excel and where they struggle. How many of their page one keywords rank in AI overviews? What type of keywords rank in AI overviews? Are they branded, long-tail, top-of-the-funnel, informational?
- Identify competitive gaps and overlaps. Of the keywords you audited, which ones do you want to rank for in AI overviews?
- Manually check your competitors’ presence in AI search engines. Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity to recommend you the best solution in your field and why. Follow the links they cite so you can understand what type of pages are favored by the AI engines.
- Look at their off-website presence. Perform a search of Reddit using Google’s site search feature (“site: www.reddit.com competitor name”) to identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and ask ChatGPT to do the same. Review their external links on SEMRush and ask ChatGPT to give you a summary (with sources) of where your competitors are active.
After doing this exercise, you will know what keywords competitors rank for, what pages help them rank, what type of content they publish, and where they are active outside of their website. You’re ready for your next step: the ascension.
Step 3: Start Your Ascension
Content Creation
We recommend starting with content creation because it’s a lengthier process, and while you wait for the content to be created you can focus on the less demanding task of content optimization.
As we’ve discussed earlier, content collections are our favorite approach to content creation. For each piece of content we aim to use schema markup and create content that is unique, valuable and informative.
In practice, that means:
- Putting valuable information towards the top and using tables of contents for easy navigation
- Incorporating stats, quotes, citations, and real-life examples
- Referencing relevant case studies and articles published by our clients
- Pruning existing content and cutting out sections (or pages) that don’t provide value
- On glossary/definition pages, answering the question within the first paragraph
Context Optimization
In addition to the AI-friendly content structure we discussed in step 1, an important part of GEO is what we call “context optimization”. We want to optimize the content for long-tail keywords variations and pain points because users don’t always know the solution they need, they only know what they struggle with.
For example: a user looking for a project management tool on ChatGPT would ask “how can I help my team stay on track with their project deadlines?” rather than “project management tool”. This is also why FAQ schema markup performs so well in GEO, it helps AI engines understand the relations between different concepts and anticipate the users’ follow-up questions.
Using clear contextual signals throughout your content (such as “project management solutions for experienced B2B managers” or “how our solutions is helping start-ups struggling with project deadlines”) is also a great way to help AI engines understand who your audience is.
Industry Visibility
To fully succeed in GEO, you need to think outside of your website and improve your industry visibility. There are several ways to do so:
- Post and respond to Reddit comments, suggesting your solution when applicable
- Build a LinkedIn thought leadership presence by posting regularly about your industry and commenting on related news
- Acquire new links via guest posts or brand mentions
- Participate in industry-specific communities on Slack or forums
Step 4: Reach the Summit and Prepare for the Next One
GEO KPIs
With the rise of GEO and AI search, organic traffic alone is no longer an indication of success. To understand how each channel is growing, where qualified traffic is coming from, and what to prioritize next, Obility recommends tracking a mix of SEO and GEO KPIs (see an example of Obility’s dashboard below):
- Traffic: organic search and AI referrals
- Key events: asset downloads, demo registrations, form submissions, anything that indicates an interest from organic and AI users
- User behavior: time on site, exit page, engagement rate
- AI vs SEO growth: comparing traffic and conversion trends across both channels
- AI overviews: which keywords trigger them, where we’ve gained or lost visibility, and how competitors are performing
- AI engines presence: where and how often clients and their competitors are cited by the main AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Deep Research)
- Keyword clusters rankings: how different variations of our target keywords perform in the SERP and in AI search
The way we measure organic ROI is evolving. Aligning KPIs across organic and AI channels helps us better evaluate performance, optimize for user intent, and scale our GEO strategy with confidence.
Content Republishing
We discussed content republishing earlier in our content pruning section. Unlike SEO, GEO moves extremely fast. Consider the example below: within 6 weeks our client in the cybersecurity industry went from 0 to 35 AI overviews and from zero ChatGPT mentions to being the number one recommended solution for multiple “top FSM” queries.
Obility’s client in the cloud software industry went from zero ChatGPT mentions to being the number one recommended solution for various “best FSM solution in X industry” queries within 6 weeks
How? By identifying keywords we wanted them to rank for, optimizing existing content, and republishing it. So if you have older content that used to perform well, or existing content that matches your target keywords, put them on your optimization list and aim to refresh and publish every few months.
Map Out Your Next Ascent (Get the Checklist!)
Just like SEO, GEO is an ongoing process. To help you map out your future ascent, Obility has created this checklist – download it now!
GEO is no longer optional. Companies that adapt their strategy and invest in technical health, user-centric content, AI-friendly content structure, and industry visibility will be the ones who succeed in AI search. Ready to map out your next summit? We’re here to guide the way. Contact us today!
