Generative engine optimization (GEO) best practices come down to four jobs. Choose the buying questions that matter. Let AI engines read your site. Make your pages and brand facts easy to cite. Then measure the same questions on a fixed schedule. GEO is the work of getting your brand named and cited in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
These answers reach a large audience. Google says AI Overviews has over 2.5 billion monthly active users (Google I/O, 19 May 2026, checked 15 Oct 2026). Google also says that optimizing for its generative AI search is still SEO (Google Search Central, checked 15 Oct 2026). So good SEO is the floor for GEO. If the term is new to you, start with what GEO is.
What are the best practices for generative engine optimization?
The best practices for generative engine optimization are the eight habits below. Most build on SEO work you may already do. The target changes: a place inside the AI answer, not only a place in the list of links.
- Track buying questions. Use the words a buyer types into an AI tool, and leave your brand name out.
- Measure before you change anything. AI answers vary from run to run, so ask each question several times per engine.
- Keep your site open to AI crawlers. An engine cannot cite a page it is not allowed to fetch.
- Put the answer first. Open every page and section with a short, direct answer to one question.
- Back claims with sources, numbers and quotes. The GEO research paper tested edits like these and reports visibility gains of up to 40% in its tests (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024, checked 15 Oct 2026).
- Say something only you can say. Google advises writing from what you know, not recycling what others have said (Google Search Central, checked 15 Oct 2026).
- Keep brand facts the same everywhere. Prices, sizes and policies should match on your site, listings and profiles.
- Earn mentions on the sites AI cites. Find the lists, reviews and forums cited for your competitors, and get covered there.
How do I start with generative engine optimization?
Start with a list of buying questions and a baseline, a record of what AI answers say today. It comes before any page edit, because every change is judged against it.
Choose 20 to 40 questions a buyer in your category would ask. Mix broad ones, such as "best sunscreen for oily skin", with ones that add a price, a city or a use. For India, track each question in English and in Hinglish (Hindi and English typed in English letters). To judge which questions people ask most, see AI prompt volume.
Then ask each question several times on each engine. Record whether your brand is named, where it sits in the list, the tone, and the pages cited. The free AI audit gives a quick first look: 5 buying questions on 4 AI engines, with no signup and no card.
What does a 90-day GEO plan look like?
A 90-day GEO plan runs in four stages: measure, fix the basics, improve your pages, then earn coverage and measure again. Ninety days gives you a baseline, two rounds of changes and a fair re-measure.
- 1. Days 1 to 7: choose your questions. List 20 to 40 buying questions that do not name your brand. Add your three to five closest competitors.
- 2. Days 1 to 14: record a baseline. Run each question several times per engine. Record mentions, position, tone and cited pages, plus your Search Console and GA4 starting numbers.
- 3. Days 8 to 21: open the doors. Check that robots.txt lets in search crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, and that your key pages are indexed in Google. The AI crawlers guide explains each bot.
- 4. Days 15 to 30: fix your facts. Write one fact sheet: prices, sizes, delivery, returns and what sets you apart. Make your site, listings and profiles match it. An llms.txt file can hold it for AI tools. Google says Google Search does not use such files (Google Search Central, checked 15 Oct 2026).
- 5. Days 22 to 45: rework your best pages. Put the answer first, add sourced numbers and dates, and cover the sub-questions AI searches for. A content AEO audit checks this page by page. Query fan-out explains the sub-questions.
- 6. Days 31 to 60: publish the missing pages. Write a page for each important question you cannot yet answer, such as a comparison or a buying guide. Google says pages made primarily to manipulate its AI responses break its spam policy (Google Search Central, checked 15 Oct 2026).
- 7. Days 46 to 75: earn coverage on cited sites. List the sites cited in answers that name a competitor but not you. Pitch, list or get reviewed on the ones that fit.
- 8. Days 61 to 90: measure again. Run the same questions on the same engines and languages. Compare each engine with its own baseline.
- 9. Day 90: plan the next 90 days. Keep what moved a number, drop what did not, and pick the next questions. Trust changes that hold across several runs.
Which page changes help AI engines cite you?
Pages get cited when they answer one question clearly, back it with checkable facts, and add something new. Three changes do most of the work.
- Answer first. Write headings as the questions buyers ask. Make the first sentence under each heading the answer.
- Add sources, statistics and quotes. The GEO paper tested these edits on user questions from many subject areas. The best edits differed by subject (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024, checked 15 Oct 2026), so test them in your category.
- Use first-hand facts. Your prices in rupees, sizes, test results and customers’ questions are facts other pages lack. Date them, so readers and engines can tell they are current.
What Google says you do not need
Google says its AI search needs no new machine-readable files, AI text files, markup or Markdown. Nor do you need to chunk content or write in a special way for AI (Google Search Central, checked 15 Oct 2026). This covers Google Search only. ChatGPT and Perplexity find pages their own way.
How do you make sure AI engines can read your site?
Check three things: your robots.txt rules, your Google indexing and one Search Console setting.
OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot, its search crawler, will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. GPTBot, its training crawler, is a separate setting (OpenAI crawler docs, checked 15 Oct 2026). So you can block training and still allow search. OpenAI adds that a robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to reach its search.
Google links a page in AI Overviews or AI Mode only if it is indexed and can show a snippet (Google AI features, checked 15 Oct 2026). Search Console also has a Search generative AI control under Settings. Including your site is the default, and an excluded site gets no traffic from these features (Search Console Help, checked 15 Oct 2026).
The AI crawlers list covers the other bots. The AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt rules for 41 AI crawlers.
Why do other websites matter for GEO?
AI answers describe brands from what they read across the web, not only from your own site. Lists, reviews, marketplaces, videos and forums often shape which brands an answer names.
The August 2026 wave of our Hinglish vs English AI shopping study collected 480 answers from ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity in India. They carried 4,640 citations, with 534 to youtube.com and 191 to reddit.com.
Earn a place on the pages cited for your competitors through a listing, a review, an expert quote or data they can cite. Citation gap analysis lists those pages.
How do you measure GEO results?
Measure GEO in two layers. The first is what AI answers say about you: visibility, share of voice, position, sentiment and cited sources. The second is what reaches your site, shown in free tools from Google and Microsoft. Answers vary between runs, so compare periods, not single days.
| Measure | What it tells you | Where to find it |
|---|---|---|
| Visibility | The share of answers to your buying questions that name your brand | An AI visibility tracker, or repeated checks logged in a sheet |
| Share of voice | Your share of all brand mentions in your category’s answers. See AI share of voice | An AI visibility tracker |
| Position | Where you come in the list when an answer names options (1 = named first) | An AI visibility tracker |
| Sentiment | Whether an answer describes you positively, neutrally or negatively, with the sentence that shows it. See AI brand sentiment | An AI visibility tracker |
| Cited sources | The websites and pages each answer links to, yours and others | The answer itself; a tracker stores them over time |
| Google AI feature impressions | How many times links to your site were shown in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date | Search Console, Generative AI performance report |
| Visits from AI assistants | Sessions from sources like ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot or Grok. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode are not included | GA4, the AI Assistant channel in the default channel group |
| Copilot citations | How often Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and some partner apps cite your pages, and which pages | Bing Webmaster Tools, AI Performance (public preview since 10 Feb 2026) |
Measuring GEO with Depra AI
Depra AI’s AI visibility tracking checks ChatGPT with web search, Gemini and Google AI Overviews daily. Perplexity is checked weekly on Starter, Growth and Scale, and daily on Enterprise. Microsoft Copilot, Claude, Google AI Mode and other models are available on Enterprise as add-ons, set up by the Depra AI team. Contact us for those.
Questions are asked from inside the country you pick, in English and Hinglish, with multi-language support. Each answer is stored in full. Reports show visibility with a 95% confidence range, share of voice, position and sentiment, for you and each competitor.
Depra AI does not write content or edit your site. Google notes that no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems (Google Search Central, checked 15 Oct 2026). Depra AI measures from the outside, by recording the answers the engines give.
Run the free AI audit, or start a 7-day free trial on Starter, Growth or Scale with no card from Depra AI pricing. You can also book a demo, where the Depra AI team sets up your project with you.
How do you measure the ROI of GEO work?
Measure GEO ROI by setting what you spent against what moved over the same 90 days. Count the cost first: team hours, writing, outreach and tools. Then compare it with three kinds of result.
- Answer results: the change in visibility, position and cited pages on your tracked questions, engine by engine.
- Traffic results: Search Console impressions from AI features, and sessions in the GA4 AI Assistant channel.
- Business results: the sales, sign-ups or leads those sessions led to, from the conversions you already track.
- The limits: an answer can name your brand without sending a click, so visits undercount the effect. Analytics that waits for cookie consent misses visitors who decline. A before-and-after view shows what moved, not why.
What does GEO look like on a real brand?
Depra AI ran these practices on its own brand, as the worked example of the Depra AI methodology. The product is about 2 to 3 months old. Each change and its date is in how Depra AI used Depra AI to get named in AI answers.
- ChatGPT: in one check from India on 15 October 2026, we asked it for the "best AI visibility tool for D2C brands in India". It named Depra AI second, after AITLAS by Shiprocket, and cited depra.ai. The same held for "best AI visibility tool in India".
- Google AI features: Search Console shows about 1,520 AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions from 16 September to 13 October 2026. That is about 3.4 times the 445 of 19 August to 15 September 2026.
- Google Search clicks: about 2.7 times as many over the same windows (112 against 41). This counts all of Google Search, not only AI answers.
- Spend: ₹0 on paid ads, and no paid backlinks.
- What it does not prove: these are one brand’s numbers over a short window. They show what moved, not that GEO caused it, and no result is guaranteed.