What every marketer needs to know about GEO

The new rules for visibility: Three GEO techniques

1. Create authoritative semantically rich content 

AI crawlers are scanning more than keywords. They model language, relationships, and context. That means your content needs to evolve from keyword-targeted to concept-driven and semantically rich. However, just like traditional search engines, LLMs still rely on structured content they can easily parse and understand. This means you need to: 

• Use semantic HTML and clear heading hierarchies 
• Create conversational, answer-first content aligned to natural language queries 
• Structure content into well-labeled sections like definitions, comparisons, pros/cons, and use cases 
• Invest in Q&A-style content such as FAQs, knowledge articles, and troubleshooting guides 
• Build focused content like “Why choose us over [competitor]” or “What others say about us” pages that clearly articulate brand positioning 
• Continue to include media transcripts and accessibility descriptions 

Traditional SEO tactics like structured data, schema markup, and topic clusters are still critical, but now they serve a new purpose: helping AI engines reason about your brand, not just crawl it.  

2. Make your content easy for AI to consume 

Even powerful content loses value if AI systems struggle to access or interpret it. To encourage AI bots to crawl and ingest more of your pages and content:  

• Optimize speed and page load time 
• Provide text equivalents for videos, audio, and rich media 
• Structure pages clearly with strong hierarchy and clean markup 
• Avoid crawler-blocking Javascript. The landscape is always changing, but some of the popular AI crawlers don’t execute Javascript. 
• Implement canonical URLs when possible.  
• Make important long-form text content public, not protected behind private login.  
• Some website security tools have begun aggressively blocking AI crawlers by default, so keep an eye out for this and avoid it when possible.  
• Include freshness signals like visible dates and meta tags for published content 
  
  

Some LLM providers may introduce direct content submission tools in the future (OpenAI does not currently provide this), but today your platform and infrastructure choices already communicate how discoverable you want to be.  

You can and should manage AI bot behavior via robots.txt and emerging standards like ai.txt. Several more advanced technical standards are under consideration throughout the digital marketing industry. One emerging standard we’re keeping an eye on is llms.txt. Some of the major DXP vendors are already including product features to help construct llms.txt content.  

3. Boost trust and sentiment signals 

Great, you’re appearing in GenAI chat answers, but are you being recommended in a positive light? Make sure you are using consistent positive tone in your content and case studies, since LLMs often reflect your content’s tone when talking about you.  

However, your brand perception in AI responses is shaped not only by your own content, but by the ecosystem around it. Get mentioned on high-authority sites that are trusted by LLMs (Wikipedia, Crunchbase, Quora, Reddit, Forbes, etc.).  

Social proof accelerates this. Customer reviews, ratings, testimonials, expert endorsements, awards, and certifications all train AI on how to describe your brand. And when sentiment turns negative, it doesn’t fade quietly. It gets amplified. Active reputation management is no longer optional.  

At Horizontal Digital, we’re helping brands operationalize this with custom, AI-powered sentiment intelligence. Our award-winning Sense Agent was built with Pet Supplies Plus and won first place out of 130 entries at the Sitecore Agentic AI Challenge 2025. This tool uses custom AI agents to analyze external reviews, map sentiment and brand voice alignment change over time, and recommends actions to improve both perception and AI representation.  

Measuring GEO improvement progress 

As SEO practices matured, an entire ecosystem of measurement and progress tracking tools appeared. The same is already true for GEO, but we’re sure the space will continue to change over the next 12 months. While the tooling is still evolving, you don’t need a complex tech stack to get started. 

Begin with a simple baseline: Regularly ask major GenAI tools how they describe your brand, products, and competitors. Or, to scale beyond manual testing, consider using an LLM visibility or AI search monitoring tool. These tools automate hundreds of prompts across different AI platforms and track changes in your presence, share of voice, and sentiment over time. This helps you measure progress month over month instead of relying on one-off checks. 

The key is consistency: Treat GEO measurement like SEO measurement. Set a baseline, track it monthly, and refine based on what actually moves the needle. 

Staying ahead in the GEO era 

If you’re serious about improving your visibility and positioning inside generative engines, get started auditing your AI presence by asking GenAI tools how they describe your brand and products, as well as competitors. What’s missing? What needs to improve? 

Remember: If you undersell yourself, generative engines will too. 

At Horizontal, we’re actively helping organizations run GEO audits, optimize for generative visibility, and implement AI-powered measurement and reporting. If you want help with the heavy lifting of making GEO improvements across your website, we’d be happy to help.