GEO: the details
The term comes from an academic paper published in 2023. The foundation is the same as in SEO: if a crawler can’t read the page, nobody cites it. What changes is what you optimize. These systems extract passages, not pages, and prefer the ones that answer a question directly, with specific facts and an identifiable source. What other sites say about the brand also counts: directories, media and communities.
In practice the work has three fronts. Technical: allow AI crawlers in, serve content as HTML without depending on JavaScript, describe it with structured data and, if you like, publish an llms.txt. Content: sections that stand on their own, clear definitions and visible update dates. And external: a consistent presence beyond your own site. Measuring it is still imprecise; it’s done by asking the assistants and counting mentions.