Insights · read the pillar first
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is getting your product quoted inside AI answers — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — instead of a competitor. It runs on the SEO foundation you already have. What changes is the target: you are writing for a model that lifts one clean passage, not for a reader scanning ten blue links. Everything here is how I do that on technical SaaS. Each check runs on this site before it reaches a client report, and when my own numbers come back bad I publish those too. Start with the pillar. The rest go deeper on one piece each.
The pillar guide: what GEO is, how AI engines choose their sources, and five engineering-grade steps — each with a verifiable check — to get a technical SaaS quoted in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews.
Every 'best GEO tools' post ranks five vendors and skips the cheapest option: doing it yourself, for free. I ran the $0 tier on my own site first — 24 prompts, one mention, one citation — before pricing out the five tools people pay for.
The six-gate audit I use to check whether AI engines can reach, read, and cite a SaaS — every command included, plus my own scan numbers, good and bad.
Bot-by-bot: which AI crawler feeds which engine, the robots.txt line to allow it — and the curl that proves your WAF isn't overruling you.
Five fixable reasons ChatGPT recommends your competitor instead of you — with the check that proves each one.
The same six checks I run in a paid audit, as a two-page PDF: what to test, what counts as a pass, and the trap at each step. Costs you an email.