Customers still visit your website, but they likely no longer arrive there first. Instead, they pause in front of AI snippets and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT that form an impression of your brand before even reaching you.
That brief moment often determines whether someone continues to research your brand or ends up exploring a competitor instead.
Question: How do you get AI and these LLMs to suggest your brand?
Answer: A GEO content strategy guide gives you the chance to shape the information AI relies on to put your brand in the best position.
If you’re responsible for your company’s content marketing, you’ve probably seen symptoms that something is wrong, including:
- AI tools summarize your category without mentioning your brand
- Competitors appear regularly in AI answers where you need to be
- Clicks and organic traffic have dipped, even while rankings look stable and impressions increase.
If so, it’s likely because AI assistants are now acting as the first filter for customer research.
That’s where GEO comes in. Generative Engine Optimization strengthens the signals these AI models pick up: structured content, credible citations, consistent brand mentions, and a digital footprint that LLMs understand and reuse.
What’s more, when done correctly, we’ve seen ChatGPT begin to cite new pieces of content in just a few hours, making a good content strategy a proven, lightning-fast way to influence AI-generated results.
In this GEO content strategy guide, we’ll break down how GEO works in 2026 and walk through the practical steps to make sure AI tools communicate your brand accurately – and recommend it.
We’ll cover:
- Is GEO replacing SEO?
- GEO Content StrategyGuide: 8 steps to improve your AI and ChatGPTvisibility in 2026
- GEO Content Strategy: Work with a GEO agency that delivers
Want to find customers via AI search results? Book a no-cost consultation with the Mint Position team, and we’ll explain how our GEO Audit will get your company noticed.
Is GEO replacing SEO?
Early in 2025, the sharp shock of generative AI on search had marketing teams scrambling to understand why strong rankings no longer guaranteed strong organic traffic.
It’s enough to make any business leader wonder if GEO is about to take the place of good old-fashioned SEO.
Yet brands that track both organic search and AI-driven discovery are finding that it isn’t a case of GEO vs SEO, but a merging of both into a broader discovery strategy.
“GEO isn’t replacing SEO, but instead can be thought of as expanding upon or supplementing it,” says Andrew Hagemann, Vice President of Strategy at Terakeet, a leading visibility platform. “Traditional SEO still matters for ranking in search engines, but GEO adds a new layer of search ranking focused on visibility within AI-generated answers and language model outputs.”
At Mint Position, we’re seeing the same shift play out in real data. Content that’s already optimized for organic search tends to perform well in answer-engine environments, too.
Lula, an SME funding platform, is a good use case: after improving their content structure and third-party brand mentions, we reached the highest ChatGPT visibility in their category and region, climbing to 45% visibility with a leading average position of 2.2, outpacing major South African banks.
Lula’s Strong SEO Grounding Helped Accelerate GEO Visibility
Source: Peec.ai
A GEO content strategy guide is the framework that leads you to this kind of outcome – a process you can carry out consistently as AI search continues to evolve.
GEO Content Strategy Guide: 8 steps to improve your AI and ChatGPT visibility in 2026
So, what’s the best generative engine optimization strategy to start closing the AI gap?
The answer is simple: create content that AI can clearly understand, trust, and reuse. That means optimizing content for how LLMs interpret information, not just how Google Search ranks it – and building the kinds of structured signals that LLMs depend on when generating answers for their prompts and AI overviews.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to doing this effectively.
1. Start with a GEO Audit
A GEO audit is the first step needed to stop guessing how AI sees your brand and start working with evidence.
Before diving into optimization or content creation, you need a real-time view of how the likes of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity interpret your site, messaging, and brand presence across the wider digital ecosystem.
At Mint Position, we begin this process by examining the same signals that heavily influence LLM answers: what’s most visible, what’s missing, and what feels unclear. We look at:
- How well AI can read your site
- How often your brand appears in high-value prompts for your industry
- Where competitors surface most and where you don’t – this is your brand mention gap
- Which content formats and types are appearing the most to generate AI answers.
The audit doesn’t attempt to solve everything at once. It simply gives you a grounded understanding of your current position, including weak spots that hold you back and early indicators of how AI models connect your business to user intent.
This becomes the foundation for everything that follows. Once you know how LLMs view you today, you can make deliberate choices about what needs to be done to close the gap.
2. Identify where ChatGPT pulls information in your vertical
After establishing your baseline visibility, the next step is understanding where ChatGPT sources its answers in your space.
Mint Position did this with CRE finance provider Duckfund through a source-mapping analysis. The snapshot below shows the top 6 domains ChatGPT relied on to construct answers for top prompts in the CRE funding sector (over the previous 30 days), as well as the average number of times each domain was cited in each answer.
Duckfund’s ChatGPT Source Analysis
Source: Peec.ai
Duckfund’s own site is the most-cited domain on ChatGPT for their industry, which signals strong entity recognition. But several other domains still shape how the model explains the category, like TechBullion and AccountingInsights on the editorial side, and Reddit on the UGC side (more of this later), for example.
This mix mirrors broader LLM search behavior. Ahrefs recently found that only 28% of pages cited by ChatGPT are pages marketers can influence, usually industry blogs, competitor content, online media, and high-engagement forums. Everything else comes from places outside traditional SEO marketing reach. This often includes archived subreddits, competitor product pages or blogs, and Wikipedia.
Percentage of ChatGPT-Cited Pages With Organic Search Presence
Source: Ahrefs
Brand mentions across these domains often determine which companies surface first, because they strengthen the signals LLMs rely on.
Yet our goal isn’t to chase every domain. It’s to understand the patterns, including:
- Which sources dominate your vertical
- Where your competitors are getting cited most, but you are not
- What content formats appear most often for the prompts/user queries you target.
Sometimes it’s an editorial overview, sometimes a detailed analysis, sometimes a Reddit thread with strong natural-language signals.
Recognizing these popular content formats among your top sources is what gives your GEO strategy real traction.
3. Analyze ChatGPT citations for your brand
Once you know which domains appear most often in AI answers, the next step is understanding which specific pages ChatGPT prefers and why.
Duckfund’s data below reveals exactly that. It shows the Top 9 URLs ChatGPT relied on most when generating answers to Duckfund’s high-value prompts (October 15 – November 15), along with how frequently each page was used during that period.
Source: Peec.ai
Highlighted in red are new articles that were created after understanding that listicles were a popular content format being cited by ChatGPT in their industry, especially on select media sites, such as TechBullion.
The result is shown: Those 4 new articles are now among the top sources being used by ChatGPT, and it took less than 2 months for us to influence these results.
Some articles even began to get picked up by ChatGPT in as few as 48 hours.
A GEO audit will show which topics each LLM pulls from repeatedly, which formats it gravitates toward, and which pages deliver the highest “citation weight” when user queries shift. Sometimes it’s a listicle, sometimes a how-to, and occasionally a homepage that’s structured cleanly enough for an LLM to absorb.
For Duckfund, this analysis led to two targeted content opportunities. After reviewing the formats and domains ChatGPT used most, Mint Position created new blogs and guest posts that matched those characteristics while still strengthening the brand’s positioning.
This is the advantage of GEO analysis: it reveals what AI actually uses, not what we assume performs well.
4. Build AI-preferable topic clusters
Once you understand which pages ChatGPT relies on, the next step is shaping the topics it expects to see from an authority in your space.
LLMs don’t follow traditional keyword research. They draw from patterns across AI-powered overviews, comparison content, and the natural language signals they gather from editorial sites, forums, and partner references. That’s why topic clusters for GEO look different from clusters built for Google Search.
A good cluster begins with identifying subjects that appear in ChatGPT answers but don’t surface as top keywords in SEO analytics. These gaps often reveal opportunities, including buyer explainers, “what to consider” guides, provider maps, and Q&A content that algorithms repeatedly lean on because it improves trustworthiness and user experience inside the model.
The cluster only works if the signals are consistent. That means:
- Covering blog topics that may not have SEO value but appear as ChatGPT citations
- Weaving similar themes into social media narratives
- Making sure any partner mentions or UGC reinforce common messaging
- Using strong metadata, clear internal linking, and concise snippets that help LLMs understand how your web pages relate to one another.
Over time, this becomes a playbook that improves brand visibility in real-time AI answers while still supporting your broader content marketing strategy.
5. Create clear, structured content that ChatGPT actually uses
As mentioned earlier, one of the biggest surprises in GEO work is that ChatGPT can sometimes lean on pages with almost no traditional SEO value.
The reason is straightforward. LLMs optimise for clarity, structure, and completeness – not rankings or backlink authority.
We keep seeing pages with almost zero SEO footprint get cited by ChatGPT simply because they’re clearer, more detailed, or easier for the model to interpret. That’s a signal to publish content for GEO even when it won’t move the needle in Google Search.
This is backed by original research from B2B SaaS growth agency Organic Labs that comprehensive, authoritative pages show a 0.79 correlation with LLM visibility.
Search-augmented models reward long-form content that answers a query in one place and carries factual depth. Academic studies echo this: LLMs reflect human citation patterns, preferring well-sourced, complete resources over shallow posts crafted for keyword density.
Structure matters just as much as depth. Pages broken into predictable modules – including clear headings, summaries, an FAQ page, and schema-supported format – show a 0.81 correlation with inclusion in ChatGPT results. Models extract answers from what they can parse quickly, which is why orderly content outperforms clever writing.
As you can see from the image, comprehensive content and structured content sit in the highest-impact, highest-confidence zone, far ahead of tactics like Bing optimization or prompt injection.
How Comprehensive and Structured Content Correlates Strongly with LLM Visibility
Source: Organic Labs
The takeaway: You’re not creating “SEO articles”. You’re creating reference-grade material – the kind of content an AI will reuse because it understands it instantly.
6. Use third-party editorials to increase brand mentions
You might have noticed that brand mentions also sit in the top-right corner of the Organic Labs impact chart. In practice, this means that what others say about your company often carries more weight with LLMs than what you publish yourself.
Third-party editorial coverage helps because models pull from a wide ecosystem when answering user queries. They look for signals across old press releases, thought-leadership pieces, niche industry blogs, data-backed explainers, and comparison-style content that maps out a category.
These formats provide LLMs with credibility and authority cues, and increase the chances of them referencing your brand.
This is why guest posting and digital PR will remain powerful in the age of GEO. When your expertise appears across multiple trusted domains, you create what’s known as triangulated authority. This is when AI sees your name in several independent contexts and is more likely to surface it.
While not a metric that ChatGPT uses, backlinks are still valuable here.
Editorial backlink building can help models connect your brand to broader topics, strengthening both recognition and retrieval. Good targets include industry-specific blogs and media, as well as popular business news outlets.
Our advice? Let the GEO audit guide you to the top domains being cited on ChatGPT, then build a content partnership with them.
Each mention contributes to a more robust footprint across the AI-powered ecosystem, improving the likelihood that ChatGPT cites (and hopefully recommends) your brand.
7. Increase genuine AI-influencing brand mentions on Reddit
Reddit has become one of the most influential inputs for ChatGPT and Google AI.
When users talk openly about a brand, LLMs treat those conversations as high-trust signals, often more reliable than polished corporate content.
The goal isn’t to “seed posts” or manufacture hype. It’s to participate in communities in a way that builds credibility. That starts with understanding your voice on Reddit, knowing which subreddits actually shape your category, and contributing in ways that feel native to those spaces.
Many brands do this by having internal experts answer questions and offer practical advice through verified or semi-personal accounts. These contributions create the kind of natural language that LLMs interpret as authentic, and without running afoul of Reddit moderators.
Reddit is also a strong place to publish case-study insights or lessons learned – content that sparks discussion without feeling promotional. When these threads gain traction, the sentiment and storytelling inside them often become inputs for AI models, improving how your brand is communicated across user queries.
“In 2026, fintech companies that understand this dynamic will start tracking sentiment on Reddit the same way they track keyword rankings,” says Grant Simon, AI search expert and founder of Kimura Digital.
In short, the more real conversations that happen about you, the more confidently AI tools reference you.
8. Monitor metrics and iterate monthly
GEO isn’t something you set and forget. AI models shift their preferences constantly, new sources enter your vertical, and visibility (including yours and competitors) can change faster than anything we’ve seen in traditional SEO.
A monthly review keeps your strategy aligned with how these LLMs are interpreting your brand right now – not six months ago.
The first step is watching how fast top citations move. When a page starts appearing more often at a top-cited source, it signals that the structure or clarity is resonating with AI retrieval. When visibility dips, it may mean a competitor has published something more complete or that older pages need fresher data.
It’s also important to track how your overall presence compares with others in your category. Competitor benchmarks reveal who’s gaining ground and which content formats are performing better across the ecosystem.
From there, revisit your topic clusters. As new user queries emerge, your clusters should adapt to match the language and intent patterns AI tools pick up. Outdated content, including old statistics, broken links, and poor explanations, should be refreshed or consolidated so the model never pulls from weaker sources.
Finally, maintain the pages that consistently act as “AI magnets.” These are often your most structured, comprehensive resources, and keeping them current is one of the simplest ways to sustain long-term visibility for AI answer engines.
GEO Content Strategy: Work with a GEO agency that delivers
Traditional SEO still matters, but it no longer covers the full path of discovery.
Google is now an AI-generation engine, and models like ChatGPT shape user understanding before anyone reaches a website. That’s why GEO is becoming one of the most durable competitive advantages in digital marketing strategy.
A GEO advantage now comes from four core pillars:
- Authoritative content that LLMs trust, cite, and reuse, from listicles to bottom-of-funnel content like product tutorials.
- Clean, structured data that AI models can easily parse and interpret
- Third-party validation across editorial sites, industry media, and high-trust communities
- Consistent multi-domain presence that reinforces your expertise from every angle
At Mint Position, we’ve established our position as one of the best GEO agencies in fintech because we understand how fintech content is interpreted, ranked, and reused by LLMs – and we build content ecosystems that match those patterns.
We’ve seen that AI visibility grows fastest when solid SEO foundations are already in place. The companies winning at ChatGPT are the ones publishing authoritative content across multiple domains. It’s not shortcuts; it’s consistency.
We’re seeing this pattern repeat across every industry we support. Duckfund became the #1 most-cited domain in its category on ChatGPT – appearing in 98% of high-value prompts – by combining structured content with strong editorial signals and solid entity foundations.
Lula achieved similar results: within 30 days, they became the most visible brand in their vertical, with a 22% lift in ChatGPT visibility and the top source in 69% of relevant answers.
These outcomes come from GEO’s core pillars: comprehensive content, structured data, credible third-party mentions, and consistent multi-domain reinforcement.
SEO makes you discoverable on Google. GEO makes you discoverable everywhere AI thinks, answers, and recommends.
Invest early, and you’ll own visibility as AI-driven search becomes the default.
Ready to see how GEO can help your company grow? Find out how our GEO Audit will help you improve visibility and get more customers.
