The Cited Method.
Five stages that move a brand from invisible in AI search to cited by name. It is the exact system I run on client accounts, and the one I run on my own.
Start here: GEO is still SEO. The single most useful thing I can tell you about AI search is that it is not a separate discipline with its own magic tricks. The same fundamentals that decide whether Google ranks you, crawlability, real authority, and genuinely useful first-hand content, are what decide whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI cite you. Google's own 2026 documentation points the same direction.
What GEO adds is a handful of specific, measurable layers on top of good SEO. The Cited Method is how I sequence them so nothing gets skipped and every stage produces something you can see.
Access
Before anything else, confirm the AI crawlers can actually reach your site. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended all have to be allowed in. I have opened up client sites that were silently blocking every AI crawler at the server or CDN and had no idea. This is the highest-certainty lever in all of GEO, and it is the one almost nobody checks.
Measure
You cannot improve what you never baselined. I run a fixed panel of the questions your buyers actually ask across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Claude, and record whether you are mentioned, whether you are cited, and who is named instead of you. That baseline is the truth we measure every later move against.
Map
Now we find the gap. Which buyer questions should name you and do not, which competitors keep showing up, and what those cited sources have that you are missing. The output is a clear map of where a citation is winnable and what it will take to earn it.
Earn
This is the work that actually moves citations: first-hand content that says something only you can say, a clean and consistent entity footprint across the web, and real brand mentions from places that matter. Brand mentions have turned out to predict AI citation better than raw backlinks, so this stage looks more like digital PR than old-school link building.
Prove
Then we watch it move. I re-run the panel on a schedule and report the citation trend month over month, with real screenshots of the AI answers naming you. Not a vanity score, not a dashboard of activity. The actual before and after of your visibility in AI search.
What I will not sell you
Three GEO tactics that do not work, no matter who is selling them
- llms.txt. A file that no major AI engine has committed to using for ranking or citation. It is not a lever. It is a to-do that feels productive.
- AI-specific schema. There is no secret markup that makes an AI cite you. Good, honest schema helps machines understand your site, the same as it always has. There is no separate AI version that buys citations.
- Rank number one and you win AI. AI answers pull from a wider and different set of sources than the top of the blue links. Ranking helps, but it does not guarantee the citation, and treating them as the same thing loses you money.
If your current agency is charging you for any of the three above, that is the tell. The work that earns AI citations is less exciting and far more durable: fix access, measure honestly, earn real authority, and prove the movement.
Want to know where you stand?
Book a free consultation and I will run the Access check live, tell you whether AI can even find you, and show you the first stage worth funding.
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