GEO: How to Get Your Brand Cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews
Something has quietly changed about how your buyers research before they buy. An increasing proportion of high-intent research now starts inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google's AI Overviews. Not on a search results page. These tools pull from a pool of sources they consider authoritative. If your brand isn't one of those sources, you're invisible in a growing share of the buyer journey.
How AI search works
When a user asks ChatGPT 'what's the best email marketing platform for SaaS companies,' the model draws on a combination of its training data, real-time web retrieval, and structured signals about which sources are authoritative on a given topic. For your brand to appear in these responses, you need to be well-documented across the web, consistently associated with specific topics, cited by authoritative third-party sources, and structured for machine extraction.
The five GEO foundations
1. Build topical authority with content cluster strategy. 2. Strengthen your E-E-A-T signals. 3. Earn citations from authoritative sources. 4. Structure your content for machine extraction. Direct-answer introductions, FAQ schema, clear headers. 5. Be present on the platforms AI tools index: Reddit, Wikipedia, G2, Capterra, Trustpilot.
Where to start this week
Audit your five most important topic areas. Run the key questions buyers ask about each through ChatGPT and Perplexity. Note which brands and sources are being cited. That is your competitive set in AI search. The gaps you find are your GEO roadmap.
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