GEO & AI Strategy

SEO focuses on ranking in Google search results. GEO targets getting your brand mentioned and recommended in AI platform responses from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and others. Because AI platforms look at different signals, it's a separate optimization discipline.

Users increasingly turn to AI for product recommendations, service comparisons, and information, and they act on the answer they get. If AI is not recommending you, you are not reaching those potential customers.

Each platform has its own algorithm, but common signals exist: mentions in trustworthy sources, evidence and identity signals such as named authors and sourced claims, fresh and high-quality content, and a robots.txt that lets AI crawlers in. Pleqo's audit measures exactly these. Schema markup and llms.txt are measured too, but we show them without a score, because we have no evidence they change whether an AI platform cites you.

First, run a GEO Audit in Pleqo to see where you stand. Second, start with robots.txt: it sits in the AI Access category and is the single heaviest item in the report, worth 8 points out of 100, because it decides whether AI crawlers may read you at all. Third, use Content Writer to create content in the formats AI platforms want to cite. Schema markup and llms.txt are worth having, but they are shown without a score, so do not treat them as the fix for a low result.

Each AI platform has its own crawl frequency and none of them publish it. Update cycles generally range from weeks to months. The one file that determines whether they can reach you at all is robots.txt. llms.txt is a Markdown map for AI agents, not an access rule, and Google has said publicly that it ignores it.

Evidence & Identity is the audit category that asks whether a reader, human or machine, can tell who stands behind a claim. Named authors with real credentials, sourced statistics, dates on your data, a contact route that resolves to a real organization. It grew out of Google's E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), and AI platforms lean on the same kind of signals when they choose which sources to quote. In Pleqo's audit it is scored as its own category.

Connect GA4 (Google Analytics 4) and Google Search Console to track AI visibility alongside your organic traffic and SEO performance. Both are available on Pro and Business plans. Read them for what they can actually tell you: GA4 attributes 6 of the 7 platforms, because Google AI Overviews traffic is mixed into ordinary Google organic traffic and cannot be separated, and Search Console does not break out AI Overview impressions or clicks either. Neither limit is a Pleqo shortcoming; the data simply is not exposed. That is why the AI side of your picture is measured from your tracked prompts, and GA4 and GSC are used for what happens after the click.

As AI visibility increases, your brand is expected to be mentioned and cited more often in AI responses, which can drive indirect traffic. However, it doesn't guarantee direct clicks, users need to click the link in the AI response or search for your brand separately. With GA4 and Google Search Console integrations, you can observe this relationship through your own data.

A blind spot is a page that ranks well on Google search but is missing from AI platform answers. By connecting Google Search Console, Pleqo overlays your GSC clicks, impressions, and queries with AI cite data, surfacing exactly which high-traffic pages AI platforms ignore. These are the pages with the highest GEO upside: you already have the SEO authority, you just need to close the AI visibility gap. Available on Pro and Business plans. One limit worth knowing about both halves of this overlay: Search Console reports AI Overview impressions and clicks inside its web search totals rather than separately, so what GSC gives you is your classic search performance. The AI side is measured from the prompts you track, not from a crawl of the entire internet.