How to get recommended by AI (IMO)

I'm almost sure everyone has already told everything you need to know about GEO/AEO. Here to share my practical experience and some experiments results.

Disclaimer: I'm writing from my smartphone and my English not the best, sorry for typos.

My background:

- 31 years

- 13 years in web development

- startup with 1.7M users, exit in 2018; 450k users from SEO

- started learning Machine Learning in 2019.

- worked with two big companies over last 3 years developing AI agents

- working on a next pet SaaS

... I'm not one of those "experts" who will tell you're doing everything wrong. I've read a lot of experiments and researches and performed one by myself. Want to share my findings.

First of all - classic SEO still alive.

It's not just "still" alive, it's a basic things you need to become recommended by AI at scale. Classic SEO includes a page loading speed, SSR, structural markup (JSON+LD)... Everything is still necessary.

Now GEO/AEO.

To be able to build some sort of optimization plan, we need to understand recommendation mechanisms. They are different. Recommendation algos of Google doesn't work like the same thing for Claude or ChatGPT. But three things remain stable between all providers:

- content freshness

- content quality & intent matching

- content authority & uniqueness

Overall mechanism is simple as:

1. LLM generates search queries from user prompt OR user prompt is already a search query

2. Retrieve a regular SERP (search engine results page)

3. Rerank results using LLM (this why your 1st place on SERP does not guarantee citation by AI)

4. Generate response

This mechanism is called RAG - Retrival Augmented Generation (pull - feed - answer).

Now let's breakdown what matters apart from SEO, it's the same as it was before AI.

This part is mostly as important as it was before AI search came to our lives. But it's important to understand that amount & quality of your website/source mentions has impact on a chance to be selected amongst others candidates during RAG.

A small note here. Some internal search algorithms like those used in ChatGPT, Grok are preferring freshness and intent matching over authority. Google and Claude are still heavily relying on authority.

Another note: LLM is a bias machine. If your domain was well-known and there is a chance LLM knows it from the training dataset - it will use its biases against your domain. It's not always bad or good. It depends on what others told about your domain. Imagine AI retrieved 10 results and Wikipedia is one of them at 7th place. LLM will most likely prefer it amongst others.

The similar behaviour I've noticed about similar content. Even a strong match doesn't guarantee your content will be chosen as a source if there is a domain with a stronger positive bias, more up to date publication or higher authority.

Intent matching

This part is the most underrated as of me. Because this is the most impactful thing in terms of organic traffic.

Let's simplify SEO blog creation flow:

- target audience -> search phrases (black t-shirts)

- search phrases -> articles with a specific keywords

Search engine weighs your page by counting frequency of keywords from user search query and counts match score. Then reranks using domain authority etc.

Now GEO blog:

- target audience -> intent / inquiry (buy black t-shirts)

- intent -> a targeted, structured response

Search engines often using reranking algos matching meaning (semantic matching) between user search and candidates. But candidates are still came from keywords matching. So the "thinking" process of AI search mostly looks like:

- find top 1000 candidates by keywords

- find top 20 who most likely answer the user inquiry by meaning <- this is a new step

- recommend/ cite some of them

Takes:

- you still need keywords to be present in your articles, blog posts...

- but your articles must carefully list FAQ section to properly match possible user intent and answer it precisely.

End.

I may be wrong in some statements. Would appreciate any clarification and learn more from people doing SEO/GEO daily.

Thanks for reading.

submitted by /u/solubrious1
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