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01 · SEO · 05/06

AI search.

Not a new trade. Not a miracle tag. GEO: your brand, quoted inside the answers.

Behaviours have changed: your prospects ask their questions to AIs, and the answer they read quotes names other than yours. That silence is what we fix, by making your pages readable and cross-checkable for the engines. Your brand enters the sources the answer quotes, and the record proves it. Talking about GEO is above all talking about SEO. We explain.

By Jérôme · SEO & data

Get my AI citations trackedRead the thesis: GEO is SEO

02 · OPERATION NOTE · OPS AI SEARCH (GEO)

AI search (GEO), decoded

The field report

Your prospect no longer opens ten tabs: they ask ChatGPT or Google, read the composed answer, remember the names it quotes. Their shortlist is made there, before any meeting. Absent from the answer, you never enter the comparison.

The cost of waiting

Every question asked without you installs a competitor as the obvious choice. The prospect who has read the same name three times no longer asks for three quotes, they ask for one. Clicks to websites keep receding: the answer is enough more and more often. That lost ground cannot be bought back at the end of the journey, even with ad budget.

In black and white

A T0 record of what AI enginesthe AIs that answer instead of the engine (ChatGPT, Perplexity…) answer to your prospects' real questions, verbatim. An llms.txtthe file telling AI engines what to quote from you file set on your site. Your entityyour brand as machines cross-check it marked up, the same name-address-networks identity everywhere you can be cross-checked. The missing source pages, written to be picked up.

The manoeuvre

GEO is first of all SEO done well: a clean technical base, solid source pages, mentions, backlinkslinks from other sites to yours, activity around your brand. Each brick is a trade we already hold: the base, the content, the measurement. That leaves tracking, and we are frank: these engines are hard to trace. So we cross a manual record with Ahrefs Brand Radarthe Ahrefs tool spotting your brand inside AI answers and Semrush tracking.

The lock that breaks

The same journey, the other way round: your prospect asks their question, reads your name in the answer, walks into the meeting with you on their shortlist. The citation recordwho engines quote, before then after the mission proves it quarter after quarter, next to your Google rankings.

03 · THE THESIS, ALREADY PUBLISHED

GEO is SEO. The engine changes, the trade stays.

We published it in June 2026: GEO is SEO, because SEO never meant Google. It means being found in a search engine, any of them, and an assistant quoting its sources is one. That engine has its rules, measured across more than a billion Ahrefs data points. Models read your visible text, not your hidden markup; schema keeps its value for Google and for your entity. Each assistant then draws from its own pool: 86% of the most quoted sources are not shared between ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's answers. So we work on meaning, entity and broad presence: mentions, backlinks, activity around your brand, not a recipe tuned to a single engine.

  • 01

    Quoted, not only ranked

    The record shows your brand entering the answers, question by question. It is a separate discovery layer: 28.3% of ChatGPT's most quoted pages have zero organic visibility on Google.

  • 02

    An entity everything corroborates

    Same name, address and networks on your site, your directories, your listings. Engines do not quote what they cannot verify elsewhere, so we align every place your brand exists. We just redid it for ours, Digital Wallonia listing included.

  • 03

    One base serving two readers

    The same work counts twice: Google ranks your pages, assistants pick them up. No trade-off between the two worlds, the technical base and the source pages serve both.

  • 04

    The position taken before demand

    GEO queries are still tiny in Belgium, we read it in our own Search Console. That is when a position gets taken: by the time your market asks AIs its questions, your pages will hold months of presence latecomers will not have.

04 · THE MISSIONS THAT PROVED IT

We were laying this groundwork before it was called GEO.

AVD Revival, 250 GTO reinterpreted by Bjorn Verheecke

AVD Revival

High-end automotive · revival

Entity, schema and cluster built from zero over 6 months.

Read the AVD Revival mission
Ecostal Group, B2B photovoltaic e-commerce, 3 storefronts EBE/EFR/YMT

Ecostal Group

B2B photovoltaic e-commerce · 3 storefronts

Structured product data across 3 storefronts, 18 months.

Read the Ecostal mission
Brasero estate, corporate retreats and weddings in Liège province

Brasero Group

Hospitality & events · 2 sites in Liège

One cross-checkable entity across two estates, 24 months.

Read the Brasero mission

05 · THE PLAY-BY-PLAY

Four steps, from the first record to the one that proves.

  1. STEP 01

    We record what engines answer today.

    A list of questions your prospects genuinely ask, put to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's answers. We note who gets quoted, on what, verbatim. Without this zero point, nobody can prove progress.

  2. STEP 02

    We lay the base machines can cross-check.

    Your entity marked up with Schema.org, an llms.txt file, a name-address-networks identity aligned everywhere your brand exists. The information goes into visible text, where models actually read.

  3. STEP 03

    We write or complete the source pages.

    Answers quote pages that assert and demonstrate. If the material is missing, copywriting writes it in your voice; if it exists, we make it extractable: clean answers, sourced figures, meaning before phrasing.

  4. STEP 04

    We rerun the record at three, then six months.

    Same questions, same engines, record compared to the zero point. Citations won are read next to your Google Search Console rankings, in the same dashboard, to decide what comes next on facts.

06 · WHAT THE ENGINE READS

The answer is assembled from sources. We install you there.

THE SOURCESTHE ENGINETHE ANSWERYOUR PAGEvisible text · entity · llms.txtAI ENGINEreads · cross-checks · picks¹²³¹ source² your page³ sourceThe answer quotes what it can read and cross-check.

The engine reads the available sources, cross-checks what it can attribute, then assembles its answer with citation marks. GEO work installs your page among those sources, and your brand inside the mark.

07 · NOT YET FOR YOU IF

Three situations where GEO is not your next project.

  • Your brand only exists on your website.

    No directory, no reviews, no press: engines have nothing to cross-check you against, and they do not quote what they cannot verify. We build that presence first; the record will wait until there is something to record.

  • Your site is JavaScript-only.

    ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity crawlers do not execute JavaScript, per Vercel's December 2024 measurement; only Gemini, riding on Googlebot, renders it. A page that is empty without JS stays invisible to them. Server rendering comes first, we saw it on our own Digital Wallonia listing.

  • You want a guaranteed volume of citations.

    An AI answer changes on average every two days, and nearly half its sources are new each time. We measure honestly and progress over time; nobody signs a number, beware of whoever does.

08 · THE QUESTIONS WE ACTUALLY HEAR

Six questions heard in meetings, answered straight.

The trade is the same, the reader changes. Your current SEO targets a ranking in a list of links; here, we target the citation inside a composed answer. Concretely, four things get added: the citation record, your entity markup, the llms.txt and pages written to be picked up. The technical base stays the same, we build on it, not next to it.

For two thirds, true: 67% of citations come from sources no marketer can influence. The remaining third is exactly SME ground: educational pages, reviews, press, blogs. The game is played on those four formats, and most of your competitors are not playing it yet. On a precise question, the first solid source installed becomes the one the rotation keeps surfacing.

With the record: the same questions asked to the same engines before the mission, then at three and six months, noting who gets quoted and on what. No tool gives a figure as clean as a Google ranking, we say it upfront. The record joins your measurement to be read next to the rest, not in a forgotten file.

Because it costs an hour and tells AI engines what to pick up from you. Adoption is underway, no engine mandates it, and ours has been live since June 2026 with zero upkeep. It is a bonus laid on a base, never the reverse: without solid source pages, the file compensates for nothing.

The answers themselves already run: in Belgium since March 2025, in France since July 2026. Their weight is measured: 48% of clicks lost in one year under an answer block, at equal Google position, an Ahrefs record on one tracked site. Now is when the position gets taken: waiting for your market to search means letting someone else become the default answer.

Yes, and you can check. Our llms.txt is live, every publication goes out through IndexNow, the JSON-LD on 42 of our pages was reworked in July 2026 after an Ahrefs flag, and our Digital Wallonia listing matches the site field by field. Our e-commerce study is built to be quoted: 579 e-shops, open data. We sell the method we apply to ourselves.

Field note

In our Search Console, geo generative engine optimization appeared in April 2026: position 8, twelve impressions in four months. Nobody lives off twelve impressions. We took the position anyway, because it cost almost nothing and it will no longer be free the day the curve takes off. The record will tell us whether we were right, or just right too early.

Jérôme · Strategy & data
JérômeStrategy & data · HeySquad

Other sub-services SEO & CONTENT

We record what engines already answer about your trade. Without you, for now.

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