From SEO to GEO: a step-by-step plan for small businesses

The step-by-step plan

The order is deliberate. Technology comes first, because a crawler that may not read your site gets nothing out of good text. Then the content, and only at the end the measuring.

1. Open your robots.txt and see which search crawlers you allow. Check your firewall or CDN as well.
2. Look at the page source of your most important pages. If your text is not in there, set up server-side rendering.
3. Rewrite the first sentence of every paragraph so that it holds up on its own, and put the answer first.
4. Add concrete figures with a year and a source to each key page, and cite where you got them.
5. Pick twenty questions customers ask, put them to the same AI tools every week and note what happens.

Why sources and figures

Sources and figures are the part with the most research behind it. In the GEO study by Aggarwal and colleagues, citing sources, quotations and statistics produced 30 to 40 percent more visibility on Position-Adjusted Word Count. That experiment ran on rewritten texts and not on real websites, and the effect differed per domain.

Do not make up figures to meet that rule. A lead time, a price or the number of customers you had last year is enough, as long as it is correct.

Where you need not spend time

Google writes that you do not need to cut your text into small pieces for AI, and that you need no special markup or AI files. An llms.txt therefore does nothing for Google Search. You can skip keyword stuffing too: in the Princeton study it did not perform well.