Most GEO advice tells you to optimize content. Add citations. Structure your headers. Implement schema markup. From my experience running AI visibility campaigns for 50+ B2B companies, this advice skips the most important step. AI doesn't cite the best-optimized content. It cites the sources it already trusts. If ChatGPT doesn't know who you are, no amount of content optimization will save you.
Here's the uncomfortable exercise nobody's talking about: Ask ChatGPT to rate your expertise. The answer will tell you exactly where you stand.
TL;DR
- Run the audit: Ask ChatGPT to rate your expertise from 1-10. Most people score lower than they expect.
- Authority beats optimization: AI cites sources it already trusts. Content structure is secondary.
- Niche advantage is real: Becoming top 5% in 'GEO for cybersecurity' requires 10x less effort than 'SEO.'
- The math is achievable: 3 podcasts + 2 conferences + 1 major publication = enough signal for most niches.
- Be proactive: Sometimes authority exists but AI hasn't connected the dots. Schema and cross-linking help.
The Audit That Changes Everything
Before you spend another hour optimizing content for AI, you need to know where you actually stand. Not where you think you stand. Not where your LinkedIn followers tell you that you stand. Where the models themselves place you.
Open ChatGPT. Run this prompt:
You are evaluating professional expertise for [YOUR INDUSTRY/NICHE]. Based on what you know about [YOUR NAME] and [YOUR COMPANY], rate their expertise and authority from 1-10. Explain your reasoning. What sources inform your assessment? What would increase their score?
Now run variations:
Who are the top 5 experts in [YOUR NICHE]? Where would you rank [YOUR NAME] among practitioners in this space?
I need help with [YOUR SERVICE AREA]. Who should I talk to? What companies specialize in this?
What do you know about [YOUR COMPANY]? What are they known for? What sources inform your understanding of them?
What you're looking for:
- Recognition: Does the model know you exist?
- Accuracy: Does it describe what you actually do?
- Source attribution: What informs its understanding?
- Competitive positioning: Where does it place you relative to others?
The model either doesn't know you exist, knows you but can't articulate what makes you different, or conflates you with competitors. This isn't a content problem. It's a reputation problem. The web hasn't told AI enough about you for it to form a clear picture.
How AI Actually Evaluates Your Content
When AI encounters a piece of content, it doesn't just read the words. It evaluates the source. The questions it's implicitly asking depend on who created the content.
The key insight: AI is building a mental model of who you are and what you're qualified to discuss. It does this by synthesizing signals from across the web. Your content is one input. Everything else the web says about you is the rest.
Why Authority Comes Before Content
The traditional SEO playbook says: create great content, build links to it, earn authority over time. For AI visibility, this is backwards.
LLMs don't discover content the way search engines do. They synthesize understanding from training data. By the time you're optimizing a blog post, the model has already formed opinions about who matters in your space. Your content optimization is noise layered on top of signal that was established months or years ago.
The Niche Advantage
Here's the strategic insight most people miss: the narrower your claimed expertise, the faster you can become the authority.
Broad: "SEO"
- • Competing with: 1000s of voices
- • Required signals: Massive
- • Time to authority: 3-5+ years
- • Examples: Rand Fishkin, Brian Dean
Narrow: "GEO for B2B SaaS"
- • Competing with: 100-200 voices
- • Required signals: Moderate
- • Time to authority: 12-18 months
- • Examples: Emerging space
Ultra-Narrow: "GEO for Cybersecurity"
- • Competing with: <50 voices
- • Required signals: Modest
- • Time to authority: 6-12 months
- • Examples: Almost nobody yet
The narrower your niche, the faster you can become the signal AI relies on. This isn't about limiting your ambition. It's about being strategic with where you plant your flag first.
Once you're the recognized authority in a narrow niche, expanding into adjacent areas becomes dramatically easier. AI already trusts you. It's more likely to cite you on related topics. The niche is your launchpad, not your ceiling.
The Math: What Authority Actually Requires
Here's what we've seen work across dozens of campaigns. For a narrow B2B niche, this combination of signals is typically enough to reach the top 5% of perceived authority:
Notice what's not on this list: hundreds of blog posts, thousands of backlinks, years of consistent publishing. Those help. But for AI authority in a narrow niche, concentrated signals from diverse sources beat diffuse signals from a single channel.
| Signal Type | Why AI Weights It | Effort Level |
|---|---|---|
| Podcast appearances | Third-party validation, usually transcribed, creates multiple source mentions | Medium |
| Conference talks | High-trust venues, recorded content persists, event pages link to you | Medium-High |
| Major publications | High domain authority, AI training data over-indexes on established media | High |
| Expert quotes | Contextual authority signals, name + expertise + topic in same content | Low-Medium |
| Community mentions | Organic validation, diverse sources, often surfaces in training data | Low |
Be Proactive: Help AI Connect the Dots
Here's something most people miss: sometimes you already have authority, but AI hasn't connected the pieces. The signals exist. The model just hasn't synthesized them into a coherent picture of who you are.
This is where you can be proactive. You're not faking authority. You're helping search engines and LLMs build their knowledge graph about you.
Your bio on your website, on guest posts, on podcast appearances, on conference pages. They should all reinforce the same expertise, use similar language, and link to the same profiles. Inconsistency confuses AI. Consistency builds recognition.
Add an "As Featured In" or "Media" section to your website that links to all your external appearances. This creates a single page that explicitly connects your identity to your authority signals. AI can crawl this page and understand the full picture of your expertise.
After Authority: The Technical and Content Layers
Once AI knows who you are, the traditional optimization advice starts working. Now your technical foundation ensures AI can access your content. Now your content quality determines whether you get cited on specific queries.
The technical and content layers matter. But they matter most after you've established the authority layer. Optimizing content that AI has no reason to trust is like decorating a house with no foundation.
How to Know It's Working
Run the audit monthly. Track these specific changes:
| Metric | Baseline | 90-Day Goal |
|---|---|---|
| Recognition | "I don't have information about..." | Accurate description of who you are |
| Expertise rating | Not rated / low confidence | 6-8/10 with specific reasoning |
| Source attribution | No sources cited | 2-3 specific sources mentioned |
| Recommendation queries | Not mentioned | Included in top 5-10 suggestions |
The shift usually isn't gradual. You'll see a step-change once enough signals accumulate. One month AI doesn't know you. The next month it does. That's the threshold you're building toward.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Most of what's being published about GEO and AI optimization focuses on the easy stuff. Schema markup. Content structure. Technical tweaks. These matter, but they're not the hard part.
The hard part is earning the right to be cited. That requires getting out from behind your keyboard and building a reputation in the real world. Podcasts. Stages. Publications. Communities. The kind of work that can't be automated or scaled with AI tools.
AI doesn't cite who optimizes best. It cites who it can't ignore. Run the audit. See where you stand. If the answer disappoints you, that's useful information. It means you know exactly what to work on, and it's probably not another blog post.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yuval Halevi
Helping SaaS companies and developer tools get cited in AI answers since before it was called "GEO." 10+ years in B2B SEO, 50+ cybersecurity and SaaS tools clients.