Table of Contents

• What you're going to implement
• Phase 0: technical foundations (this week)

  • Useful prompts for this phase
• Phases 1 and 2: citable content (weeks 1 to 4)

  • Useful prompts for this phase
• Phase 3: external authority (ongoing, and probably the most profitable)

  • Useful prompts for this phase
• Phase 3b: make the most of YouTube

  • Useful prompts for this phase
• Phase 4: measure and iterate (from month two)

  • Useful prompts for this phase
• Minimum checklist
• Back to the research

What you're going to implement

GEO doesn't start with buying a tool. It starts by making your content findable, understandable and verifiable, and by building presence outside your own site. This guide condenses the research into a five-phase plan, ordered by real impact rather than by what looks flashiest.

Phase 0: technical foundations (this week)

This is the first thing to do, the cheapest, and where most creators skip it:

• Index your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. This is the single highest-priority step in the whole guide: ChatGPT retrieves results through Bing's index, and an analysis of 80 million queries found that 87% of its citations match Bing's top results. Without this, ChatGPT can barely cite you at all. It takes about ten minutes.
• Review robots.txt with judgment, not panic. AI crawlers fall into three groups: training bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, CCBot), search bots (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot), and on-demand bots that fetch a specific page at a user's request (ChatGPT-User). If you want generative search visibility, allow the search and user-agent bots. Blocking training bots is a legitimate data-policy decision, but it won't improve your citations; blocking search bots, on the other hand, can cut your AI traffic with no guarantee it reduces your citations.
• Create an author page with real experience, a photo, a bio, and sameAs links to your verifiable profiles (LinkedIn, YouTube, social accounts).
• Keep your basic schema in place: Article, Person, Organization and VideoObject where relevant. Don't spend time on FAQ or HowTo schema thinking it's a visibility "hack" — both lost their rich result in Google. Check the official schema.org documentation.
• Set up a custom AI channel in GA4. Traffic from AI assistants often gets misclassified as "Direct" because many visits arrive without a referrer. Create a custom channel group with a regular expression on Source that includes chatgpt.com, openai.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com, and place it above "Referral" in priority order. Even so, expect the real traffic to be undercounted.

Useful prompts for this phase

• "Review this robots.txt [paste the content] and tell me whether I'm blocking OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot or Googlebot. Flag only blocks that affect search, not training."
• "Write the regular expression for a custom AI channel in GA4 that groups traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot based on the Source/Medium field."
• "Write an 80-word author bio for [your name], who specializes in [your topic], including verifiable credentials and suitable for an author page with Person schema."
• "Give me a checklist to verify that my sitemap and main pages are properly indexed in Bing Webmaster Tools."

Phases 1 and 2: citable content (weeks 1 to 4)

Pick your five to ten most important articles, and for each one:

1. Answer the main question in the opening paragraphs. An analysis of millions of ChatGPT citations found that 44% of citations come from the first 30% of a page's content. Don't bury the answer.
2. Turn subheadings into real questions, using a question-and-answer format where it makes sense.
3. Add sources, statistics and your own examples. This is the tactic with the strongest empirical backing — explicit citations, data and sources were the best performers in the academic study that originated the term GEO.
4. Separate facts, opinions and inferences with clear language; don't mix what's verifiable with your own point of view without flagging it.
5. Link related articles, videos and products to each other, building a coherent topical network.
6. Update information only when you've actually reviewed it, and reflect the real update date. Several analyses suggest that content updated within the last few months gets noticeably more citations than stale content, and that going more than a quarter without refreshing it raises the risk of losing citations you already had.

Don't repeat keywords artificially: in the original study, keyword stuffing performed worse than doing nothing. Clarity and precision are more useful than padding.

Useful prompts for this phase

• "Here's my article about [topic] [paste the text]. Rewrite the introduction so it answers the main question in the first two sentences, without losing the rest of the content."
• "Act as a real user searching for information about [topic]. Give me 15 concrete questions they would ask, ordered from most basic to most specific."
• "Turn these subheadings from my article [paste them] into real questions someone would search for, keeping the content's logical order."
• "Review this article [paste the text] and flag which claims don't have a source, statistic or example backing them up."
• "Read this text [paste it] and mark which sentences are verifiable facts, which are my opinion, and which are inferences, without rewriting anything yet."
• "Which parts of this article [paste it] are outdated or might need a data review before republishing it?"

Phase 3: external authority (ongoing, and probably the most profitable)

This is where most GEO guides fall short, and where the data points hardest: brand mentions off your own site correlate with AI visibility far more than any tweak inside your page.

• Participate authentically in Spanish-language Reddit, niche forums and communities where your topic is already being discussed; this isn't about self-promotion, it's about contributing real value where your expertise fits.
• Aim to appear in listicles, comparisons and third-party reviews (industry outlets, directories, review sites).
• Pursue interviews, collaborations and media mentions: it's the slowest path but also the one that carries the most weight long-term.
• If you have a recognizable brand or personal entity, work on building coherent presence across sources that help solidify it (verified profiles, consistent bios across all your channels).

The goal isn't to farm artificial mentions, but to take part in conversations where your expertise genuinely belongs.

Useful prompts for this phase

• "Search your knowledge for Spanish-language subreddits, forums and communities where [your topic] is actively discussed. Prioritize the ones that seem most active and least spammy."
• "Give me a list of media types, directories or listicle sites where it would make sense for a brand in [your niche] to appear, along with the angle that might interest them."
• "Write a short, non-generic message pitching a collaboration or interview about [your topic] to a niche outlet or creator, without sounding like a mass-outreach template."
• "Review my profiles [paste LinkedIn, YouTube, website bios] and tell me whether the description of my experience is consistent across platforms or if there are contradictions that could undermine trust."

Phase 3b: make the most of YouTube

If you already produce video, you have an advantage many text-only creators don't: YouTube is, according to several analyses, the single most-cited domain within Google's AI Overviews.

• Turn each important article into a video with a title, description and full transcript optimized around the same target questions as the article.
• Add chapters so the content is easy to chunk and cite in parts.
• Embed the videos in blog posts and related course pages.
• Work the reverse path too: every new video can become a post with a direct answer up top and question-and-answer blocks.

Useful prompts for this phase

• "Here's the transcript of my video about [topic] [paste it or attach it]. Split it into chapters with approximate timestamps and a short title for each one."
• "Write a 150-word YouTube description for this video [paste the transcript or summary], optimized for the questions someone would search about [topic], without keyword stuffing."
• "Turn this video transcript [paste it] into a blog post with a direct answer at the start and question-and-answer blocks, keeping the conversational tone where it fits."
• "Review this YouTube title and description [paste them] and tell me whether they clearly answer what question the video solves."

Phase 4: measure and iterate (from month two)

Test 10 to 20 questions related to your brand in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, manually at first. Log whether you show up, which sources appear alongside you, which competitors get mentioned, and whether there's a link to your site.

Don't chase an exact position or trust a single "score": answers are variable, they change by platform, country and moment, and various studies show that the overlap of cited sources between different platforms for the same question can be minimal. Watch for patterns over several weeks, not a single sample.

If manual tracking becomes too heavy, entry-level tools like Otterly.ai (around $25-30/month) are a reasonable step before considering higher-tier options like Peec AI, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Semrush AI Toolkit, or, for larger operations, Profound.

Useful prompts for this phase

These are the ones you actually run in ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity to audit your visibility, not prompts about your content:

• "What are the best options for [your category/service] in [your country or region]?"
• "Recommend trustworthy resources or experts on [your topic] in English."
• "What does [your brand or name] say about [your main topic]?"
• "Compare [your brand] with [known competitor] in terms of [relevant aspect]."
• "What sources did you use to answer this? List them with a link if possible." (to get the AI to show you what it based its answer on)

And to analyze what it answers:

• "Here are five responses from ChatGPT/Gemini/Perplexity about [your topic] [paste them]. Tell me which brands or sources show up repeatedly and which only appear once."

Minimum checklist

• Sitemap submitted to Google and Bing.
• robots.txt reviewed: AI search bots allowed, no panic blocks.
• Important pages crawlable and indexed.
• Visible authorship, with an author page and sameAs profiles.
• Custom AI channel configured in GA4.
• Direct answer up front in your key articles.
• Sources, statistics and original examples in every important article.
• Real update dates, reviewed regularly.
• Related video and full transcript for each important article.
• Internal links between content, videos and products.
• Authentic presence in at least one relevant community (Reddit, niche forums).
• Weekly or biweekly log of questions and answers in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.

Back to the research

To understand the data, limits and myths behind this plan, read GEO: Research and a Personal Perspective on SEO in the AI Era.

If you have specific questions, continue with Frequently Asked Questions About GEO, SEO and AI Search.