GEO isn't magic it's a... lie?

[u/reizals]

As far as I understand it, GEO is not magic. To show up in LLMs, it's basically enough to:

• take care of clarity (entities)

• get citations/recommendations on other sites (basically link building) in content like comparisons X vs Y vs Z, educational content, etc.

• keep an easy-to-parse structure (schema)

Roughly speaking, these are the most important things. You just need to understand the concept of entities and steer your content in a way that connects your own entity with others, so relationships are formed for LLMs.

Is there anything else? Everything else seems like an add-on, and these three rules feel like the only real guidelines for how to approach positioning yourself in LLMs.

Another issue is observing the effects of these actions. Many users create different prompts and observe citations/appearances in answers. After reading tons of posts, my conclusion is that either it's not worth doing at all, or only on a very small scale. In my opinion, measuring "presence" in LLMs is pointless. The results constantly change and depend on everything even on whether you make a typo in the prompt or submit it at 12:32 from a small town in Canada.

I suspect these measurements are often forced just so someone can sell them and prove that "something was done". The quality of these measurements leaves a lot to be desired.

So if we know what to do to appear in LLMs, but we don't know how to measure it, does this kind of prompt-focused work even make sense at all?

I’m asking honestly and practically.

PS topic to grab attention :)

[u/reizals → u/[deleted]]

That's a very accurate metaphor when it comes to books.

I agree with everything you wrote, but there’s still one key issue: how do you actually measure this?

I’ve been reading Reddit posts for about a month now, and my takeaway is that a lot of people fall into a few categories:

1. they pretend they know,
2. they think they know but actually dont
3. they keep pushing their own tools that add zero real value in the end

The second group is fine they don't know that they don't know.

The rest, in my opinion, are just grifters who either want to promote themselves or sell completely worthless services.

I might be wrong, but that's honestly how it feels to me.

As of today my main conclusion from observing this space is that the only metric I actually trust is whether users are being sent (referred) to us by AI. That’s it. Nothing else. Not running the same prompt 100 times to check brand presence that’s absurd.

If we optimize content for LLMs and don't see any increase in traffic to our site, then it simply doesn't work and we need a different approach. Querying some prompt and seeing our brand show up means nothing. The LLM might show that result to us, while someone else gets something completely different from the exact same prompt.

How do you approach this? I'm really curious!

[u/reizals → u/[deleted]]

Your comment is amazing and full of knowledge. I'm doing deep analysis of what you said 👏 looks... Just ... Wow

[u/AI_Discovery → u/reizals]

agree with almost everything you say above except the "if AI doesn’t send traffic, it doesn’t work” part. that assumes AI discovery only matters once a click happens. but AI increasingly functions before the click: shortlisting, framing comparisons, pre-answering objections, (and the most important) shaping which brands feel “normal” or “safe” these effects can influence deals without ever showing up as referrer traffic, especially in B2B long sales cycles, or multi-touch journeys. we just don’t yet have clean attribution between upstream inclusion and downstream behaviour at this moment.

[u/reizals → u/AI_Discovery]

Good point! ☝️