Prioritized GEO: How Brands Should Focus Resources on AI Visibility

Marketing teams are stressed about their AI search visibility. They want their brand to show up in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews/AI mode, and any other LLMs that become popular.

But this field is like the wild west right now. Every week a new tactic is hyped as the thing you “must do” to show up in LLMs: add llms.txt, add key takeaways to content, or word headings as questions.

People can’t even agree upon a name for this field:

• GEO: Generative Engine Optimization
• LLMO: LLM Optimization
• AEO: Answer Engine Optimization
• AIO: AI Optimization

…much less what the best practices are.

This endless stream of GEO tactics is confusing marketing teams. We see it in questions from our clients, emails we receive, and all over the web.

The real issue is misplaced priorities. People don’t know what to do first or how to move forward with limited budgets and time. They want to cut through the noise, focus on what actually works, and skip the tactics that are all hype or hearsay.

We’ve spent the last few months testing these tactics. We even built our own AI visibility tool, Traqer.ai, to help track clients’ AI visibility because existing tools had too many issues (a topic for another article).

While we don’t have all the answers — nobody does — what we do have are results. Our clients are consistently being mentioned, and our articles are cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

We’ve developed a framework to help clients consistently reproduce these results. We’re calling it Prioritized GEO because it organizes all the random GEO tactics you see online into clear tiers of priority.

This article introduces our Prioritized GEO framework, explains the reasoning behind it, and shares real client results from using it.

If you’re interested in working with us to grow your AI search visibility, you can learn more or reach out here.

The GEO Priorities Pyramid

The first step to prioritizing GEO tactics is categorizing them. Every tactic we’ve seen fits into one of three buckets:

1. Owned content
2. Off-site mentions
3. On-site tactics

Owned content is content you write and publish on your own site.

Off-site brand mentions are getting online publications like magazines, industry sites, or communities like Reddit or Wikipedia to mention you (“digital PR”).

On-site tactics is what we’re calling everything that involves changing your site or content to help LLMs better understand it, like adding llms.txt, starting articles with “key takeaways”, wording headings as questions, and more.

The prioritization of these three groups can be summarized in what we call our GEO Priorities Pyramid:

The bottom of the pyramid — Owned Content ranking in Google — should be prioritized first, as it’s the foundation of your GEO strategy. Then, off-site brand mentions serve as a way to further boost visibility. Finally, on-site tactics can be layered as the cherry on top, but they shouldn’t be relied on to produce outstanding GEO results on their own.

To understand why, we first need to explain how LLMs gather information to formulate responses, and how your brand can influence them.

How GEO Works

The Two Mechanisms Behind Every GEO Strategy

All GEO tactics operate through one of two mechanisms:

1. Exposing your brand to LLMs
2. Helping LLMs better understand your content

Owned content (the foundation) and off-site mentions (digital PR) both work by exposing your brands to LLMs, while on-site tactics are designed to help LLMs better understand your content once they reach your site.

We’ll start with the bottom two layers of the pyramid: owned content and off-site mentions. Namely, how they both rely on traditional web search to expose your brand to LLMs.

Why Web Search Is Foundational to AI Visibility

Most people don’t realize that both on-site content and off-site brand mentions boost AI visibility by surfacing your brand to LLMs.

Not only that, but they also do so with the same intermediary step: by showing up in traditional search results on Google or Bing. LLMs encounter your brand when they crawl or search the web to produce their answers.

This is a critical point worth emphasizing: GEO is fundamentally linked to traditional SEO because LLMs search the web to help produce most responses — in particular, responses about product recommendations, which are the responses most marketing teams should care about.

Yes, of course LLMs also draw from their training data to generate responses. But AI companies don’t reveal much about what goes into their training data or how often they update it, so it’s unclear how to influence training data.

What is clear is that these LLMs actively search the web to supplement their answers — a process called grounding — to ensure their answers are up-to-date and accurate.

OpenAI even notes on ChatGPT’s search help page that it performs searches whenever it believes an answer could benefit from one, not just when a user explicitly clicks “Search.”

ChatGPT doesn’t search the web every time, but when you ask for product recommendations, it usually does.

How can you tell when a response is grounded? There are two key clues.

First, ChatGPT will literally say “Searching the web…” or even show what it’s searching for:

Or, if a response includes citations, it means ChatGPT used web search to ground its answer:

Meanwhile, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity are literally web-search summarizers — they pull content from across the web and then summarize the results in their output.

Here’s Google AIO’s own explanation of how AI Overview works:

And here’s the same from Perplexity’s article on how it works:

So if we know that LLMs can be influenced through their web searches, the natural next question is: what keywords or prompts should a brand try to rank for?

Why Bottom-of-Funnel Topics Should Be Prioritized in GEO

Bottom-of-funnel topics should be your top focus in GEO because they:

1. Actually have a shot at getting your brand mentioned by LLMs.
2. Are far more likely to be grounded in web search.

Let’s break this down.

In traditional SEO, top-of-funnel keywords used to drive a lot of traffic. As we’ve stated for a decade, that traffic rarely converted, but at least it got traffic to your site.

But in GEO, top-of-funnel topics don’t drive traffic because users don’t need to leave the LLM to get answers to those questions.

When users ask ChatGPT for how-to advice or to learn about a topic, they typically stay within ChatGPT for the entire exchange. They don’t need to visit your site unless they really want to read your article — and that’s literally the point of these AI tools: they answer your questions so you don’t have to search the web yourself.

Yes, top-of-funnel queries may include sources (they can also be grounded in web search), but the click-through rate on those sources is extremely low.

Note: OpenAI doesn’t release click data for ChatGPT, but we can infer the trend from Google AIO data, which shows a huge reduction in organic search result clicks when AI Overviews are present.

In short, for top-of-funnel topics (like “what is” or introductory “how to” content), LLMs either provide an answer without citing sources or mentioning any brands (so you get zero traffic), or they cite sources but the traffic you get is minimal. Not a great strategy, so don’t prioritize top-of-funnel content for GEO.

Instead, focus your AI visibility efforts on showing up when users ask about products. These are “bottom-of-funnel” topics with prompts like “what are the best accounting tools for a small business?” or “Who are the top SaaS content marketing agencies?”

For these prompts, the LLMs will list brands or products in its response. Your goal is to be one of them (client examples below). No source click needed. It’s literally recommending your product to the user.

And to emphasize what we said above: for these product-related topics, LLMs are very likely to search the web to help supplement their response because they know that their training data isn’t likely to have the most up-to-date information on the best products in a particular space.

If your brand shows up (and is discussed positively) in these web searches, you have a shot at being recommended by LLMs.

To summarize:

• Prioritize bottom-of-funnel topics as they drive almost all of your GEO results (traffic and conversions).

• All major LLMs use web search to decide which products to recommend for those prompts.

• Showing up in traditional Google search is the key to your GEO strategy.

Prioritizing the Three Categories of GEO Strategy

1. Owned Content Is the Foundation

If both owned content and off-site brand mentions expose your brand to LLMs via web search, why do we have owned content as the foundation of the pyramid, with off-site PR tactics secondary? There are several reasons.

Owned Content Gives You Space to Control Your Brand Narrative

You have full control over the depth and direction of content on your site, giving you the space to tell your brand and product story. You can make your content extremely detailed, covering:

• Your features in detail
• The pain points you solve
• The customers that are ideal versus non-ideal
• Your differentiators versus competitors

This matters in AI search — especially with ChatGPT — because users don’t just type short keywords into these tools; they have conversations. ChatGPT looks for products that solve a user’s specific problem. It’s not just matching phrases or counting backlinks like traditional SEO.

To recommend you, it needs to understand exactly who your product helps, how it helps them, and why it works.

This is the long tail of GEO, where tools like ChatGPT recommend products and services through prompts and conversations so personalized to the user that no tracking or AI visibility tool can fully capture them.

We discuss this at length in this article.

Owned Content Kills Two Birds with One Stone (GEO + SEO)

SEO still works. I know it’s not cool to say right now but it’s the truth. It’s still driving way more traffic than ChatGPT, it’s the foundation of Google AI Overviews, and it’s driving leads month over month for our clients.

For example, here are the monthly free trial starts from people landing on G&C content for the past two years for one of our clients. This doesn’t even include conversions from AI mentions that the content influenced, it only reflects direct traffic from our articles:

So if we’re talking about prioritizing, you should focus on the thing that gives you two channels in one effort. Your own SEO content does that far better than a short mention on Reddit.

Less Algorithm Update Risk

If your GEO strategy relies heavily on showing up on one site (like Reddit), you run the risk of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Perplexity tweaking their algorithms to rely on that site less — and killing your GEO strategy overnight.

In fact, that literally happened with Reddit on ChatGPT:

Apparently ChatGPT is not using Reddit much anymore for their answers. I guess they realized that what random people say can’t be considered a trusted source after all. You can all stop spamming it with your fake brand mentions now. pic.twitter.com/PrDuFJhpNz

— Andrea Bosoni (@theandreboso) September 30, 2025

In September, multiple people reported that the number of prompts with Reddit as a source dropped dramatically. So if you’d spent thousands on “Reddit marketing’” before then, it very likely was wasted (or made much less effective).

But the chances of ChatGPT and others de-prioritizing all sites across the internet (like yours) is very low. Your brands’ site is one of billions that make up the bulk of the internet’s content. They have been used to power Google results for decades and aren’t easily “updated” away. We think there’s less “update risk” with your own content than relying on a single major outlet.

Easier to Execute

For most brands, producing your own content to rank on Google is both faster and cheaper than “digital PR.” Most companies, if pressed, could produce a blog post for each of their top three SEO keywords this month. They likely know who on their team would write it, how much it would cost, and what the final product should look like.

But if I asked you to get Reddit mentions or land a feature in a top industry publication right now, how would you do it? Most companies haven’t done that before. They don’t have the internal know-how or the right vendor relationships.

You might say “we’ll just hire a PR agency,” but have you done that before? Do you know how to vet them or tell if what they’re doing is actually working?

This kind of organizational know-how matters. It could take you a year to figure it out — a year you could have spent publishing and ranking for your key bottom-of-funnel terms while LLMs start discovering you.

That’s why we’re not saying digital PR is a bad strategy, just that it should come second on your priority list.

2. Off-Site Brand Mentions Help Boost Visibility

As we said, off-site mentions work through exactly the same mechanism as owned content: by getting you to show up on Google first.

This means Reddit, Wikipedia, and other supposedly “special” sites that help you get mentioned by LLMs really just boil down to showing up in traditional Google or Bing searches when LLMs search the web to formulate their responses.

Which leads to our #1 advice for this category: focus your attention on getting mentions in sites that actually appear for the queries and topics you care about, not just sites that people claim are the most cited by LLMs overall.

The Problem with “Where AI Gets Its Info” Charts

You’ve probably seen those LinkedIn posts with charts showing “Reddit is the most cited source by ChatGPT”.

The implied or sometimes explicitly stated takeaway from these studies is that brands should invest in Reddit marketing.

But it’s important to remember how these studies work. They’re just adding up citations across a bunch of queries that may or may not have anything to do with your brand.

For example, look at the footnote below the graph on the righthand side above:

“Based on 150 thousand citations from 5,000 randomly selected keywords from Semrush database.”

How do you know if those random keywords have anything to do with your brand or not? You don’t. What you should care about is what sites show up for the queries or prompts your brand is targeting.

We’re finding that for many of our clients (especially B2B clients), the most cited domains are industry publications, not Reddit or Wikipedia.

For example, take our client Toro TMS, which makes software for trucking and bulk hauling companies. Here are five prompts related to the topic “trucking management software”:

And here is Traqer.ai’s analysis of the most popular domains cited for each of these prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview:

The domains cited most are:

• PCS Software
• TruckingOffice
• Connecteam
• Wise Systems
• Toro TMS (our client’s domain)

All of these are trucking, transportation, or dispatching related sites. Not Reddit. Not Wikipedia.

We also see this pattern in less niche industries.

Here are the most cited domains across five prompts in the topic “best project management software” a very competitive, popular topic.

The prompts:

The most cited domains:

Again, all project management software domains. None are general community sites.

We have countless other examples like this across our client base. For these clients, it wouldn’t make sense to prioritize getting Reddit mentions.

Do Citation Outreach Instead of General “Reddit Marketing”

Instead, brands are better off doing citation outreach. This means identifying the domains and pages that actually get cited for your target queries, then reaching out and pitching why you deserve to be included in their lists or articles.

This will get your brand mentioned in the domains and pages that LLMs are actually finding and citing when generating their responses.

We offer this citation outreach as a service for clients in our engagements.

3. Why On-Site Tactics Are the Least Important to GEO

The third and final category of GEO tactics is what we call on-site tactics. These include things like:

• Adding an llms.txt file to help web crawlers better understand your site

• Including “key takeaways” at the top of each article to signal what it’s about

• Adding FAQs (on pages or site-wide) since LLMs tend to favor question-and-answer formats

• Changing your headings to questions for the same reason

Notice how these differ from the first two categories of GEO strategies. They don’t help your site get discovered by LLMs, they’re meant to help LLM crawlers interpret your site, brand, and products once they’ve already found you.

That’s why on-site tactics sit at the bottom of our Prioritized GEO framework.

Getting discovered by LLMs is far more important than helping them “understand” your content. If LLMs aren’t discovering your content when they’re generating answers, then what’s the point of any on-site optimization? That’s why LLM exposure is fundamentally more important than assisting LLMs in content understanding.

The entire magic of LLMs is that they already understand natural language. If they’re discovering your content and it’s written reasonably well, they’ll get it.

That said, should you try these on-site tactics? We’re testing them as we write this, but here’s what we know so far:

• llms.txt – This doesn’t seem to help at all. It’s just a proposed idea from Jeremy Howard, the developer and founder of fast.ai, about how sites could help LLMs crawl a site. There’s no evidence OpenAI or others use it, and our tests suggest it doesn’t make a difference. We don’t recommend spending time on this.

• Key takeaways, FAQs, etc. – We don’t have clear data on this yet but we are testing some of these tactics. What we have data on is that multiple clients are showing up on LLMs with our content that doesn’t have any of these tactics applied to it. So while we don’t have proof these don’t work, we have plenty of evidence (some below) that they aren’t necessary.

Process: How We Execute GEO for Clients

These are the steps we take in an engagement with clients to build and execute a content strategy that gets both GEO and traditional SEO results.

#1. Identify Bottom-of-Funnel Topics

Our process starts with topic ideation. Using our Pain Point SEO framework, we identify bottom-of-funnel topics an ideal customer might search when looking for a solution like our client’s.

Next, we find traditional SEO keywords that align with these topics.

For example, our client InnovationCast developed software for innovation departments in large companies to manage ideas and innovation workflows. Their most foundational bottom-of-funnel topic is “innovation management software”.

We then find traditional SEO keywords like these that both humans and LLMs might search when researching innovation management software:

Important note: If you rank in the top few spots for keywords like this, you’ll naturally capture a range of long-tail variations. We’ll show an example using these exact keywords below. This matters because LLMs may phrase their search for innovation management in many different ways — a concept known as “query fan-out”. Focus on ranking for the head term first, and the long-tail variations will follow.

#2. Produce High-Quality Owned Content as the Foundation

This content should be the foundation of your GEO strategy as per our GEO Priorities Pyramid. It should rank for the traditional SEO keywords that both humans and LLMs search when looking for products like yours.

So, it’s important and therefore needs to be written really well. Remember, LLMs will act like your SDRs (sales development reps) and summarize and pitch your product to their user via this content. Good content equals a good pitch.

It’s our firm belief that this foundational content shouldn’t be AI generated or written by a freelancer who doesn’t know your product (the flawed “Google research paper” approach).

To produce high quality sales-level content on these topics, we use our interview-based writing method to interview the most knowledgeable people in the organization on how the product should be positioned: sales, founders, product leaders, head of marketing, etc.

These pieces need to cover details of who the product is for, how it’s used, what pain points it solves, benefits, features, and more. That’s what gives you a chance at showing up at the extremely specific queries a customer might type into ChatGPT when asking for products.

If you still want AI assistance for writing, you can try our writing product Wave Writer — it learns your product’s positioning and brand arguments to produce far better content than other methods.

#3. Link Building and/or Citation Outreach (Optional)

After content is published, we do traditional link building to earn backlinks from contextually relevant domains.

We use our AI visibility tool Traqer.ai, to identify which domains are most frequently cited for prompts related to the topic. Optionally, we run a citation outreach campaign to contact those sites and ask if they’re willing to include our client’s product in their list.

#4. On-Site Tactics (Optional)

Finally, after you have the foundational content written, you can also test or just use some of these on-site tactics like key takeaways or FAQs. Our current client results don’t indicate that these make much of a difference in AI visibility but they also seem harmless if you want to include them.

Our rule: Don’t let these GEO tactics get in the way of creating high-quality content that impresses real customers and drives conversions.

Results: AI Visibility Examples From Our Clients

InnovationCast: Enterprise B2B SaaS

Here are results from the example around innovation management software above.

Traditional SEO Rankings

Our piece on innovation management software is ranking for these traditional SEO queries:

You can see how it’s ranking in the top spots for a variety of traditional SEO keywords related to innovation management software. This is the natural “query fan out” that foundational SEO content results in. This helps give you visibility on a bunch of related searches LLMs may perform when generating a response.

Then we monitor visibility using Traqer on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AIO:

You can see in the Traqer screenshots how different prompt phrasing gives you very different visibility results.

This is why we track multiple related prompts for a topic, not just one.

Constitution Lending: Evidence of ChatGPT Directly Using Our Article’s Wording

Our client Constitution Lending is a private lender for real estate investors (e.g., folks flipping houses). One of their main loan types is “DSCR loans.” Their differentiator is fast closings and high loan-to-value (LTV) ratios, which we write into every article we produce for them.

When we ask for fast-closing, high-LTV DSCR lenders in the US, it recommends Constitution Lending:

But not only does it mention them and cites our article on DSCR lenders, but it cites the exact value props and features we state in that article — like loans up to 80% LTV, quick pre-approval letters, and closings in as little as four days:

This is why it’s important that this foundational GEO content is carefully written. How you position your product in this content is how ChatGPT and others will position it to their users.

Google AI Overview

We’ve also seen plenty of cases of this in Google AI overviews. Here, it names our client Insider as one of the best CDPs (customer data platforms):

It cites and links to the article we published on their site about the best CDPs.

In fact, clicking the link doesn’t just open the page — it scrolls down and highlights the section where we discuss the 5 best enterprise CDPs, naming Insider first and discussing their platform in great detail:

Perplexity

Here’s a jobs to be done (JTBD) query packed with serious buying intent and laser-focused specificity:

I have a business in the healthcare space that I’m looking to sell. Can you help me think through what I need to do to sell it?

Our article for Axial — a company that helps business owners looking to sell find a broker — appears as the first source on Perplexity:

Notably, this article ranks #1 on Google for “how to sell my healthcare business.”

Want to explore executing this strategy for your brand? Reach out to us.

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