GEO Strategy · Practical Framework
I spend most of my week looking at how brands turn up in AI answers, and one thing comes up over and over: very few teams have an actual GEO strategy. Most have a list of things they tried once and a vague sense of whether any of it worked.
It usually goes like this. A founder asks ChatGPT about their category, doesn’t see their brand, and gets twitchy. Someone adds an FAQ block. A writer rewrites a few headings to sound more like answers. A month later nobody can say whether any of it helped, because nobody measured where things stood to begin with. It feels productive, but you come out the other side having learned almost nothing.
Generative Engine Optimisation is the new industry-adopted term that basically means earning visibility in the answers that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews give people.
And the practice of GEO is being “adopted” by brands of all shapes and sizes. In these early days of GEO, we’re almost immediately seeing the challenges. The output moves around. Ask the same question twice and you can get different answers. Ask it on two platforms and you certainly will. Ask it in two markets and you might not realise you’re looking at the same category. A handful of prompts checked by hand will never give you a strategy. You have to measure it properly.
A GEO Strategy Framework
What follows is the framework we use at reconnAI when a brand is starting from nothing. The argument I’ll keep coming back to is this: rigorous tracking comes first, before any of the optimisation work. One of my favourite quotes is — you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
Most teams treat it as the reporting they bolt on at the end to show their working, and that gets the order exactly backwards. The payoff comes later, from the insights that tell you what to do next.
Of course, every brand and industry is different, but the core principles remain the same. I don’t want to undersell the practice of GEO — there is a lot more to the work that goes in to conquer your market in AI search and dominate — but this is how we’d recommend you think about GEO if you’re early in your journey.
1. Getting clear on the fundamentals
Before you go near a tool, get clear on five things. Skip them and no dashboard will rescue you.
The questions you want to own
GEO plays out at the level of prompts and topics, and keywords matter far less here than they do in search. Work out what a real buyer types into an assistant when they’re in your category, and treat those clusters as the things you want to be the answer to.
Porting over your old keyword list and hoping is not a plan. Sure, it’s important context, but you want to track the granular questions your target market has.
Who you’re really up against
The brands winning AI answers are often well outside the competitive set you watch in organic search. Comparison sites, niche publishers, community threads and review roundups regularly beat household names inside an answer.
Build your plan around the brands that actually show up, even when they’re not the names you’d expect.
The sources models lean on
Assistants build answers from things they cite, so a lot of this is an off-site job: getting mentioned, reviewed and referenced by the domains the models pull from.
You can only influence those sources once you know which they are. And we’re finding that they vary massively per brand.
Whether your content is even usable
A model can only cite something it can read and trust. Vague, out-of-date or badly structured pages get skipped over even when the brand behind them is strong. Strong brand, weak page, no citation.
Where you’re going to play
Six platforms, several markets. Trying to win all of them at once from a cold start is how teams burn through effort with nothing to show. Deciding where to concentrate is one of the bigger strategic calls you’ll make.
Get those straight and the work becomes measurable, which is the point where a strategy can actually start.
2. Start with an AI Visibility baseline
The most common early mistake is changing things before you know where you stand. Do that and you lose any ability to prove what worked. Did the new content move the needle, or did the model just update on its own? You’ll be left guessing.
This is where reconnAI — our AI visibility tracking platform — comes in, and it’s why we built it the way we did. Before you touch a page, you want a few numbers in front of you.
AI Visibility score and share of voice
This is where you stand today across the six platforms, and how much of the conversation belongs to you. It’s the starting line, and the number everything else gets measured against.
Average mention position
There’s a real difference between being mentioned and being the answer. Turning up halfway down a response is worth a lot less than leading it, and raw presence numbers paper over that.
Daily trend data
A single reading tells you almost nothing. These answers shift around constantly, so you want a line you can watch over time, which is what lets you separate a genuine move from ordinary day-to-day wobble.
The discipline is the whole point: fix the baseline before you change anything, so every improvement after that is something you can prove rather than something you’re hoping for.
How reconnAI supports your GEO
reconnAI is an AI visibility tracking tool that enables your brand to track all of the questions your customers are asking across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews. We track daily answers and capture all of the vital intel that enables you to reverse-engineer winning strategies in your industry.
- Measure AI search presence
- Reveal how LLMs describe you
- Understand competitive dynamics
- Take confident, data-led action
- Create content optimised for search
Speak to our team today to learn more about GEO at your company.
3. Map the landscape
A baseline tells you where you are. The next job is working out where to fight, and for that you need to see the ground around you.
Competitor comparison
This answers the question every stakeholder asks within thirty seconds: who’s actually winning the AI answer in our space? The more useful part is the trend. A rival pulling away on share of voice calls for a very different response from one you’re slowly reeling in.
Topic performance
For a team starting out, this is the view I’d point them to first. It splits your visibility by topic area and shows where you rank and which way each one is heading. You nearly always see the same shape: a few topics you already win, several you’re losing heavily, and a cluster where you’re sitting just outside the top spots. That middle cluster — the near-misses on topics that actually matter commercially — is usually the best place to start.
That’s how you get from “we should do GEO” to a ranked list of where to act. You put your effort where movement is both realistic and worth having, instead of spreading it thinly across everything.
4. Don’t average away the platform and market differences
Visibility varies enormously by platform and market, and a single headline number hides exactly the thing you need to see.
You might lead on one platform and barely register on another. You might own your category in one market and count for nothing in the next. Those gaps are where your real decisions live, and averaging them into one figure buries the work that matters most. A from-scratch strategy has to pick where to concentrate, and you can only pick well once you can see the variation.
reconnAI’s platform and region breakdown splits visibility performance reporting across the six platforms and across markets, so the asymmetry comes straight to the surface. A brand that finds it’s first on one platform but absent from another for its core topic has just found the most important job on its list. Miss that and you’ll keep polishing the platforms where you’re already fine.
5. Turning data into action
Tracking tells you what’s happening. The insight layer tells you why, and what to do about it, and that’s the part that turns measurement into ongoing improvement rather than a monthly status update.
Citations: where to go and earn a place
Since models assemble answers from sources, the domains and URLs they draw on in your category are the closest thing to a map you’ll get. They tell you which publishers to pitch, which comparison sites to get onto, which community threads carry weight, and which of your own pages already get cited and deserve reinforcing. It takes “be more visible” and turns it into an actual outreach and content list.
Content readiness: the bit nobody enjoys
A citation is wasted if the page a model lands on is stale, off-brand or a mess structurally. Checking your content against the things that count — whether it’s accurate, current, optimised for AI and traditional search, and on-brand — is what closes the gap between getting referenced and getting referenced well.
Sentiment: the one teams forget
Showing up only gets you so far, because how you’re described carries real weight. Being cast as the cheap-but-limited option lands very differently from being the trusted default, and watching sentiment is how you catch that before it sets.
Those three together are what actually drives improvement. The baseline and landscape views tell you where to aim. Citations, content readiness and sentiment tell you what to do once you get there.
6. Closing the loop
GEO is something you run continuously, more like an ongoing routine than a launch you ship and walk away from.
You measure the baseline, decide which topics and gaps are worth your effort, do the work — earn citations, fix content, push on the platforms and markets where you’re weak — then measure again to see whether it landed, and go round again from a new baseline.
This is where period-over-period comparison pays for itself. Comparing against the previous period tells you whether a specific change did anything. Comparing against the previous year takes seasonality out and shows you the real direction of travel. Both turn “we think this is working” into something you can put in front of a board, which is usually what keeps a programme funded.
reconnAI is the record you keep coming back to: the steady baseline, the comparison that checks your work, and the insight that points you at the next move. The dashboard won’t write your strategy for you (although our team can help you!). What it does is stop you guessing, which is where most GEO programmes quietly fall apart.
Where to start with GEO
You can start with very little, and a baseline is enough to begin.
Work out the topics you want to own, see where you genuinely stand across the platforms and markets that matter to you, and pick the two or three gaps with the most to gain. The rest builds from there.
If you want to know where your brand stands right now, getting a baseline across the LLMs is the obvious first move, and everything else sits on top of it. If you’d like to learn more about GEO, what we’re seeing in the industry and how it applies to your business, get in touch.
Matt Johnson
Co-founder, reconnAI