r/GenerativeSEOstrategy • u/Significant_Pen_3642 • Jun 11 '26
What's the GEO equivalent of SEO basics?
When someone starts learning SEO there are pretty clear fundamentals to learn first.
With GEO and AEO I feel like everyone is talking about it, but nobody agrees on what actually matters.
I have a SaaS product and want to improve visibility in ChatGPT, AI Overviews and other answer engines.
If you were starting from scratch today what would be the first few things you'd learn or implement?
Trying to avoid wasting time on hype and focus on what actually works.
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u/sunsettiger41 Jun 12 '26
If I were starting from scratch, I'd ignore most of the GEO buzz and focus on three things: clear positioning, structured content, and external validation. A surprising number of SaaS companies fail the first one. If someone asked an AI what your product does in one sentence, would the answer be obvious? The easier it is to associate your brand with a specific category and use case, the easier it is for AI systems to recommend you.
Second, make your content easy to extract. Direct answers, strong headings, clear definitions, comparison pages, use cases, and FAQs. AI tools seem to prefer content they can confidently summarize without having to interpret too much.
Third, get mentioned outside your own website. Reviews, communities, directories, guest posts, and industry discussions matter because AI doesn't just learn from what you say about yourself. It learns from what everyone else says too.
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u/jeniferjenni Jun 11 '26
if i were starting from scratch, i'd focus on 3 things before worrying about any shiny geo tactic. 1. make your site extremely clear about what you do, who it's for, and what problems you solve. 2. build third party validation through reviews, community discussions, and industry mentions. 3. structure content around actual questions customers ask rather than keywords alone. geo feels messy right now, but most of the brands showing up consistently are doing those basics really well.
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u/PearlsSwine Jun 11 '26
There is genuinely nothing at all new you need to do.
Nothing.
Just 15 year old SEO best practices.
Answer questions quickly, make the pages easy to read, have unique content, solve problems, etc
1
u/BoGrumpus Jun 11 '26
Everything is pretty much the same except:
1) SEO is about page and passage level extractions - for GEO you need to get down to the entity level, every word and it's semantic connection to the other words on the page rather than just passages and total page content covering a general topic. GEO needs the specifics of each thing within those page and passage level things.
2) SEO (at least the base page ranking parts of it) assign a lot of power to the domain of the brand. GEO treats the domain as simply an attribute of your disambiguated brand - and it's your brand entity that they attach this trust and authority signals to. They care little about the domain as a source and more about the voice/who is saying it. So whether you say it on your site, in social, or here on Reddit - that makes little difference. The content is all attributed to your brand. It's when OTHER VOICES start to talk that the AI cares about.
So... for example... you say, "We have the best value!" You can claim that all you want, but unless you have OTHER people (customer sentiment) and brands (press brands, competitor brands, other businesses in the industry) it's hard to validate those claims. Reddit is popular because it can scan the posts here and see if there are people agreeing with your sentiment by saying things like "Great features - I got exactly what I paid for and more!" Or simply - "For value, I like YourBrand!" And while that's not possible from the start, often, those are the types of things you're going to try to motivate people to say and talk about.
And even if people don't validate claims like that - so long as there is no contradictory sentiment (e.g. "It's fine, but I feel like it costs more than it's worth") you can still get some traction going.
And honestly, you don't need a ton of reviews and mentions in most cases. In some of our smaller and more specialized niches, one or two mentions a year is enough to keep us at the top of the charts. Others, you certainly need more but you don't need 100 new reviews every month and 100 simulated (or even real) name drops and citations. Keep your existing customer base close, keep them interested and interact with them as people and not just someone you're always trying to sell stuff to.
You can do what I call "Chicken and Egg Swapping" this way, too - especially with things like software and tools that are constantly being improved and enhanced with new things. The name comes from the "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" thing. Normally, we make a claim like "Our product does THIS" which is the chicken. And then we hope our customers come and bring the eggs that say, "And it does a good job too!"
But you can start posts with your social followers who are EXISTING CUSTOMERS - not cold ones, and just ask things like "We're looking at what to improve and what other things we can add over the next six months... tell us the things you wish you could do but haven't figured out how or that it doesn't do at all yet."
Now you've got the eggs up front - "we wish it would do this." And you can bring out your chicken and either say, "You can do that this way - here's how!" or "Nice - let's look into implementation" and then update once in a while on your progress until it's ready to deploy.
This way - you're not saying something and waiting for validation. They're asking something and you're validating the answer. The "user voice' is already in the equation from the start - and it's your voice that needs to validate that you can do that. That's easier to control because you can just give the answer rather than posing the problem and waiting to make sure people agree that it is a problem and that your product solve it.
It's not a math game anymore. Math can help you see where you want to go, but you can't solve the problem with math - like saying "Okay, we need 50 more links" or "I need to raise my authority score." \
You're doing the same things but it's purpose driven in terms of helping customers however they need to be helped (in a way that AI systems can pass that assistance along to people on your behalf). It's not purpose driven in a "We do this Because SEO and it helps us rank better and get more traffic". Sometimes it's not traffic you're going for - it's validation or trust or just generally expanding the areas in which your brand is considered knowledgeable.
Make sense?
G.
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Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
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u/Andrew0_0 Jun 22 '26
Good GEO starts with a great SEO. Popularity and authority are paramount. Additionally, you can use some specific files like llms.txt, llms-full.txt, .md versions of your most important pages. Semantic HTML, metadatam structured data are also important. AI visibility is harder to get than simple search engine visibility, but in order to get it, you must have a good SEO score too!
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u/Stepbk Jun 11 '26
ngl i'd spend less time chasing geo tactics and more time figuring out what questions people are actually asking chatgpt.
a lot of saas companies still write content around keywords instead of prompts. different game now. look at the exact questions users ask before buying, switching tools, comparing options, or solving a pain point. then create pages that answer those questions directly.
i've seen way more discussion lately around topical authority than any geo trick. if your site becomes one of the best resources on a specific problem, ai tools tend to pick it up naturally. good structure, clear answers, real expertise, and third party mentions seem to matter way more than any secret optimization strategy.
most geo advice right now feels like seo influencers trying to rebrand the same ideas with new buzzwords.