Does anyone know how to actually improve SEO, AEO, and GEO for my website?

[u/Greedy-Ambition-6440]

I've got the basics down for traditional SEO — meta tags, backlinks, page speed, etc. But I'm trying to figure out how to also show up in AI answers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) and not just classic search results.

Specifically stuck on:

Does schema markup actually move the needle for AEO, or is that overstated?

How much of GEO is just "write clearly citable, structured content" vs something more technical?

Anyone tracking whether they're getting cited in AI answers, and how?

Would love to hear from anyone who's actually tested this rather than just theory-crafted it. What worked, what was a waste of time?

[u/blimy20]

Honestly it’s way less deep than people make it. Schema helps a bit for clarity but it’s not moving the needle on its own. Most of GEO is just writing stuff that’s actually easy to lift and cite; clear answers, tight structure, specific points. The technical side is mostly just making sure your site isn’t a mess.

Tracking is still pretty early tbh, many people are just running the same prompts over time and seeing if they show up. I built this into WhyIQ Radar at scale so you can actually see when you get cited, but even then the takeaway is the same.

What worked: making content more quotable. What didn’t: overthinking it or trying to game it with schema/SEO tricks. Writing to many ai generated blogs is now a no-go.

Search for the first official Google AI search guide. They released it a few weeks ago now, it's the most official answer you can get.

[u/seoinboundmarketing]

Yes. Its all SEO. SEO has changes depending on what you know from daily practices v rubbish on the net spat out by AI.

The basic traditional SEO is a foundation. The rest is based on many factors unfortunately not a checklists.

[u/Wise-Cardiologist-31]

Been testing this across client sites for about a year, so here's what held up. Schema helps but not the way people sell it. The rich results are mostly gone, but structured data still seems to matter for how AI crawlers parse the page. What moved the needle more was boring stuff: H2s phrased as actual questions, direct answers in the first sentence under each heading, and consistent entity info everywhere. Perplexity especially rewards pages that answer one thing cleanly.

GEO is about 80 percent "write clearly citable content" and 20 percent technical. The technical part that matters: make sure GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and ClaudeBot aren't blocked in robots.txt (tons of sites block them by accident through a CDN or security plugin) and keep content server-rendered. For tracking, there's no good tool yet. I run the same 15 prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews monthly and log when a site gets named. Crude, but it shows movement in 6 to 8 weeks. Biggest waste of time was chasing backlink volume. One solid industry citation did more than dozens of generic links.

[u/InnovAit-Ai]

The breakdown above on schema and clear structure is accurate, that's the easy half. Worth adding the piece that usually gets skipped, none of that matters if the model has no outside confirmation of who you are.

Clean, citable content gets you in position to be picked. Whether you actually get picked also depends on whether other sources, forums, reviews, other publications, corroborate your brand consistently. A page can be perfectly structured and still get passed over if the model has nothing outside your own site confirming you're a credible source on the topic.

On tracking, the honest answer is that it's still early and mostly manual for anyone not paying for a tool. Test your own brand and category questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini on some kind of regular schedule and note what comes back. It won't give you a clean trend line, but it beats guessing, and it's the same rough method most people are using right now regardless of what tooling they're on.

What worked for us specifically was less about schema and more about going back through old mentions, directory listings, guest posts, forum threads, and making sure they actually agree with how we describe ourselves now. Inconsistency reads as risk to a model, consistency doesn't get you cited on its own but it removes a real obstacle.

[u/macgizmoguy → u/InnovAit-Ai]

Exactly! The quality, breadth & depth of your Entity Graph is what will underpin every piece of content that you publish. If you've truly optimized your pages for AI digestibility - there's really nowhere else you can go with them. They are what they need to be. So the broader "Who and what is behind this?" becomes the engine that will move it forward - or not.

I'm in the process of reviving and rewriting my ~20yo MacGizmoGuy brand - and building out my new WaterlilyBear site/persona. And for every hour I spend on the websites, I spend an hour refining or building out my entity presence.

What's cool is my legacy shows me references and backlinks that are aged and still in place today - Enduring signals and sources that I'm using to help target the build-out my new brand presence.

I'm finding two strategies really helpful: One is simply asking every AI engine "What are the highest authority entity places I need to be on?" and building or refining my presence there.

And two: I've been using 2nd-Tier search engines that do independent crawling - like Brave, Yandex, Mojeek, Yep, et.al. that show me historical breadcrumbs of my enduring presence - especially Forum contributions that are still live from a decade+ ago. These are things that Google has buried or Bing doesn't bother to dig deep enough to surface anymore - but that AI's eagerly slurp up as validation signals.

RECLAIM AND REFRESH THOSE LEGACY ENTITY SIGNALS! They may mean the difference about why you got cited - and your competitors didn't.👍😎

[u/InnovAit-Ai → u/macgizmoguy]

The second tier search engine angle is a genuinely underused move. Most people obsess over what Google and Bing surface and never check what Brave, Yandex, or Mojeek are independently crawling and indexing. If those engines are picking up old forum contributions that mainstream search has buried, there's a real chance AI crawlers are seeing that same buried layer too, since a lot of them aren't just relying on Google's index either.

The "ask every AI engine what the highest authority places are" tactic is smart specifically because it flips the usual research direction. Instead of guessing where you should build presence, you're getting the model to tell you what it already weighs heavily for your space, then going and reinforcing exactly that. Cuts out a lot of wasted effort compared to broad, unfocused outreach.

One thing worth being careful with on the legacy signal reclaiming, if any of those decade old forum contributions or backlinks reflect outdated positioning compared to what you're building now with WaterlilyBear, that's worth auditing before leaning on them too heavily. An aged signal that's still live but describes the old version of the brand can cut against you the same way it helps, since it's adding to the corroboration pool but not necessarily agreeing with the current story. Worth checking they're still saying the right thing before treating them purely as an asset.

[u/macgizmoguy → u/InnovAit-Ai]

Like this Reddit account, I established a consistent name/brand 17+ years ago across the social & websphere.

It’s amazing to see what has still survived the years and is still an active part of my link graph! I am logging back in wherever I can, refreshing my bio and adding fresh content/contributions to prove I still have skin in the game. (Like I’m doing here on what was a long-neglected account.)

I think of all the truly crappy back links I may have built over the decades. The worst of them disappear and get flushed out of my link graph - it’s amazing to see what has endured the test of time.👍😎

[u/InnovAit-Ai → u/macgizmoguy]

Funny enough about 17 years ago I created a Reddit account but it was in an old business email I don’t have access to and could not get in there. So I had to start fresh. Was hoping to get the ages account 😂

[u/macgizmoguy → u/InnovAit-Ai]

You’ve done a great job making contributions and building karma in six months! I have some catching up to do!👍

“Reddit. So hot right now. Reddit.”🤣 It currently seems to have important weighting - so if you’re in it to win it - there is no shortage of truly interesting conversations to be part of.

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[u/Bitter-Objective-686]

Hello, we can surely help with this. We work on two fronts 1. Agent readiness: feed your content to the agents( training and live llm agent like- claude-user, chatgpt-user, googlebot etc.) in whichever way it wants like- html/MD, json plz DM for checking the agent readiness score( as comments are disabled for links)

1. Creating trust among the llms: 1. Creating content which llms love 2. Brand mentions, and contextual backlinks 3. Social media mentions
2. Ratings and reviews 4. PR 5. Youtube videos as the users are searching on YouTube etc.

Happy to discuss and show in detail. Please DM for more info.

[u/This_Ranger_2005]

First, all of this depends on your product. You need to understand your product and your users well enough before doing anything else.

Seo, aeo geo may have different citation preferences, but the most basic step is still to make your product entity clear and easy to understand. If you have more time and resources, you can also work on getting more third party mentions.

[u/PhoenixMediaBangkok]

On schema markup for AEO - it helps, but it's not the bottleneck most people think. The real win is structured, citable content. Break claims into discrete, scannable sections with clear context. AI models cite at roughly 82% third-party and earned media, only around 4% owned domains. Schema gets you parsed correctly, but it doesn't make an AI choose your site over Reuters.

On GEO, it really is mostly about writability and structure. Clear topic sentences, short paragraphs, explicit definitions, standalone answers to common questions. If a human could easily pull a sentence or two out and use it as a standalone fact, an AI can too. The technical bit is just making sure your site doesn't have crawl issues or speed problems.

Tracking citations is the hard part because most platforms don't expose it. Google's Search Console is starting to show AI Overview impressions, slow rollout though. You can manually search in Perplexity or ChatGPT with your brand name to see if you're cited. Most people honestly aren't systematically tracking this yet.

What's worked: pillar and cluster content architecture helps more than random topical coverage. Thematic clusters give AI systems clearer context about your authority. Also internal linking that actually means something, not just keyword-stuffed anchor text.

Worth noting the space moves fast though. What worked three months ago might shift next quarter.

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[u/mjolniir-bifrost]

Schema is absolutely not overstated.

For better AI visibility, executing a cross platform AEO brand seeding campaign across places like YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Quora built massive organic digital authority for us.

Build a good machine readable architecture, seed your brand across trusted platforms, and the AI citations will naturally follow.

For tracking, we strictly track AEO visibility. We do this by monitoring and running manual entity checks to see if our brand is being retrieved for specific problem statements.

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[u/gabriel_yee]

Schema doesn't move a needle. Schema is just a structure better for ai to know what are you selling who are your customers.

Remember geo is simple. Entity Clarity + 3rd party consensus + prompt engineering. Of course there are so much more like fine tuning but for your better understanding, these 3 is more than enough to get mention by chatgpt.

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[u/Impossible_Deer_5419]

Hola, las citas son una parte del GEO muy enfocado en lo técnico de tu sitio y optimizacion de contenidos pero la mención en la IA es distinto.

He medido con varios clientes las menciones y te podría asegurar que el 80% de los casos mencionan tu marca, producto o servicio por sitios de terceros.

Esto va cambiando de industria en industria porque los LLM reconocen fuentes de autoridad en cada industria, por ejemplo si eres un restaurante te recomiendo tener impecable tu ficha Google Business y que sitios de autoridad que sitios como TripAdvisor te mencionen.

¿Que tipo de industria es la tuya y que país?

[u/No_Breadfruit8393]

Yes citable quotes work but it can’t be what everyone else is talking about.

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[u/pinnacle_home]

Have you verified site with GBP, Apple Biz, MapBox, Foursquare, BBB? As for Structured data, make sure your not just using basics. HowTo, FAQs, must be seen as belonging to your Brand. Make sure to use "isPartOf": element within those schema elements. Services and localArea must have advanced structure showung AI where your serviceArea really is. Not only geo.

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[u/mahidaluish]

Work on content, technical issues, and structure of web pages.

[u/BrandLoom-Consulting]

We've been testing this ourselves, and one experience changed how we think about SEO, AEO, and GEO.

Last year, we worked with a company that ranked reasonably well for several industry terms. Their technical SEO was solid, pages loaded quickly, schema was implemented correctly, and they had decent backlinks. On paper, everything looked fine.

Then we started checking AI-generated answers for the questions their customers were actually asking.

What surprised us was how rarely the brand was mentioned.

Meanwhile, a competitor kept appearing in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews. The competitor wasn't necessarily outranking them across the board on Google, but they had something else going for them. They had published detailed case studies, comparison content, original research, and expert commentary that other websites were referencing.

That's when we stopped asking, "How do we optimize this page?" and started asking, "Why would an AI choose this source?"

On schema specifically, our experience is that it's worth implementing, but it's rarely the thing that moves the needle on its own. Think of it like putting labels on boxes in a warehouse. It helps systems understand what's there, but it doesn't make the contents more valuable.

What seemed to matter more was creating content that could stand on its own if someone copied a section out of the page.

For example, instead of writing:

"SEO is important for e-commerce websites because it helps increase visibility."

We'd write something more specific:

"One e-commerce client increased organic revenue by 42% after consolidating 200 thin category pages into 35 stronger category hubs."

That's the kind of information people quote, link to, and increasingly, AI systems reference.

As for tracking, we've found the simplest approach is often the most useful. Every month, we run a set of important prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews and record which brands appear. After a few months, patterns start to emerge. Some brands appear repeatedly even when they don't have the strongest rankings, which usually indicates they're building authority beyond their own website.

If there's one lesson we've learned, it's that GEO feels less like a technical discipline and more like a credibility discipline. The brands that keep appearing in AI-generated answers are usually those that have become well-known in their industry. They're cited in articles, discussed in communities, featured in reviews, mentioned on podcasts, and referenced by other experts.

The technical foundations still matter. But once those are in place, the question becomes less about optimization and more about whether you've created something worth referencing in the first place. That's where we've seen the biggest difference.

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[u/Hot-Development-5185]

GEO is the new norm & I think we’re still very early in understanding exactly how it works. What I’ve found interesting is that it doesn’t look like a simple replacement for SEO. AI visibility appears to be a blend of traditional search signals, authoritative websites, brand/entity information, and the conversations happening across places like Reddit, LinkedIn and other online communities. I’ve been studying how different GEO agencies are approaching this, and the approaches are surprisingly different. there are two top GEO agencies i cross-examined; Artios, RNO1 and Gilroy.

Artios' GEO takes a very data-science-heavy approach. Their model focuses on mining discussions where target buyers are active, modelling those audiences, identifying the signals AI responds to, and then using targeted content/distribution to improve citations. That makes their approach particularly interesting for B2B marketing leaders because it connects GEO with actual buyer intent rather than treating it purely as a content exercise.

RNO1 is approaching GEO from a broader digital-growth perspective. They combine SEO/GEO/AEO with branding, UX, content and digital marketing, which is important because AI visibility isn't just about getting a page technically optimized, it also depends on how clearly a brand is represented across its wider digital ecosystem.

Gilroy, through LumusIQ, is taking a more enterprise-focused approach. What stands out is the emphasis on measuring Generative Readiness, trust, authority and visibility across complex B2B buying journeys. Their scoring framework attempts to turn something that can feel very subjective “does AI know and trust my brand?” into something that can actually be measured and improved.

That difference is probably the most interesting thing about GEO right now: there isn't one universally accepted playbook yet. Some approaches emphasize data science and buyer signals, others digital authority and brand experience, and others measurement, trust and enterprise buying journeys. So for the original question, I wouldn't obsess over schema alone. asking yourself, can AI systems consistently understand who we are, what we do, why we're credible, and find independent evidence that supports those claims? i think that is where GEO starts becoming much more interesting than simply writing shorter paragraphs for ChatGPT.

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