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GEO for Beginners: Your First 30 Days (2026) | GEOly | GEO Data Platform for DTC Brands
GEO for Beginners: Your First 30 Days of Generative Engine Optimization
Summary
Follow a four-week GEO roadmap — audit, technical fixes, answer-first content, then monitoring — and in 30 days you'll move from AI-invisible to measurably cited across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
2026/07/05
7 min read
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of getting your brand recommended, cited, and summarized accurately when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity for advice instead of typing a query into Google. For a beginner, the first 30 days are not about chasing every tactic at once — they follow a simple four-week sequence: measure where you stand, fix the technical basics so machines can read you, rewrite your most important pages to answer first, then set up monitoring so a single model update doesn't quietly erase you. Work through the roadmap below and by Day 30 you'll have a real GEO foundation and a score you can actually track.
If the term is new, it helps to read what GEO is alongside this plan — GEO here always means Generative Engine Optimization, never anything geographic.
Key takeaways
GEO means earning accurate mentions and citations inside AI answers, not ranking ten blue links; the skills overlap with SEO but the target has moved.
Start with a baseline. Run a GEO audit and record an AIGVR score before you change anything, so you can prove what worked later.
Weeks 2 and 3 carry the most leverage: an llms.txt file, schema markup, and answer-first content blocks do most of the heavy lifting.
AI visibility is volatile — continuous monitoring across all seven major engines matters more than any one-time fix.
You can complete the whole plan on free tooling; GEOly's free audit and 3-day trial cover the baseline and monitoring steps.
How the 30 days break down
Think of the month as four moves, one per week: diagnose, build the plumbing, rewrite for answers, then defend your position. Each week ends with something concrete — a score, a file, a set of rewritten pages, an alert system. Most of it needs no developer, though you'll want one on hand for the schema step in Week 2.
A quick expectation to set: GEO is a compounding game. You will not jump from invisible to cited across every engine in a month. What you can do in 30 days is remove the technical reasons AI models ignore you, publish the content they prefer to quote, and put instruments in place so the next 90 days improve on evidence rather than guesswork.
Week 1 — Diagnosis and baseline
You cannot optimize what you have not measured, and most brands are genuinely surprised by how invisible they are to AI crawlers on day one.
Days 1-3: Run a GEO audit
An audit tells you why engines can or can't use your site today. GEOly's free 29-point audit scores you across four dimensions:
Crawlability — can AI bots actually reach and render your pages?
Understandability — is your data structured so a machine can parse it?
Citeability — does your content read as trustworthy and quotable?
Convertibility — can an AI-assisted shopper complete a purchase without friction?
Fix the red flags first. A blocked robots rule or a JavaScript-only product page will undo everything else you do this month.
Days 4-7: Establish your AIGVR baseline
AIGVR (AI-Generated Visibility Rate) condenses how often and how prominently AI engines surface your brand into a single 0-100 score. Create a project, add your ten most important brand and category prompts — the questions a real customer would ask — and let the platform run them across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Grok, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overview. Write the number down. Everything you do for the next three weeks is measured against this line. For the full metric set that sits alongside AIGVR, see AI search visibility metrics and KPIs.
AI search visibility dashboard tracking mention rate, AIGVR and Share of Model across ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI engines — Source: GEOly AI (app.geoly.ai)
Week 2 — Technical foundations
Now fix the plumbing so models can read your site cleanly.
Days 8-10: Publish an llms.txt file
This is the highest-return quick win of the month. An `llms.txt` file is a plain-text map at yourdomain.com/llms.txt that tells AI agents what your site is about and points them to your most important pages — About, pricing, documentation, key product categories — each with a one-line description. Shopify brands can generate and maintain it automatically with GEOly's LLMs.txt tooling instead of hand-editing.
Days 11-14: Add schema markup
Structured data is a name tag for your content. Add `Organization` schema to your homepage so engines understand who you are, FAQPage schema to your FAQ so answers are machine-readable, and Product schema to product pages so AI shopping surfaces can quote accurate prices and availability. This is the one step where a developer saves you hours.
Week 3 — Content that answers first
AI engines reward the inverted pyramid: the answer, then the supporting detail. Rewrite your priority pages in that order.
Days 15-18: Sharpen your entity pages
Models read your About and brand pages to decide what your company actually is. Make sure those pages state, in plain language, who you are, what you sell, who you serve, and why you're credible — awards, founding date, notable customers, real expertise. Vague mission copy gives an AI nothing to cite.
Days 19-21: Write definition blocks
Collect the top questions people ask in your category and answer each in roughly 40-50 words, placed near the top of the relevant page. These tight, self-contained answers are what engines lift verbatim into a response. This is where GEO overlaps with answer engine optimization — the discipline of being the direct answer, not just a source in the footnotes.
Week 4 — Citations and monitoring
Days 22-25: Analyze your citations
AI models trust what other authoritative sites say about you more than what you say about yourself. Citation analysis shows which sources engines pull from when they answer questions in your category, and where competitors appear but you don't — the truth gaps worth closing with outreach, a guest post, or a corrected listing.
Citation source analysis: source type distribution and the domains AI engines cite most — Source: GEOly AI (app.geoly.ai)
Days 26-30: Set up continuous monitoring
A model refresh can change who gets recommended overnight, so treat monitoring as permanent, not a launch task. Configure recurring prompt tracking to watch your brand mentions and sentiment across all seven engines, and set alerts for sudden drops or negative framing. If you want to benchmark against rivals rather than just yourself, layer in Share of Model to see what slice of AI answers your brand owns versus the category.
After Day 30
By the end of the month you've moved from AI-invisible to AI-instrumented: a clean technical base, content built to be quoted, and a live view of your standing across every major engine. The next phase is compounding — improving your AI visibility prompt by prompt, closing citation gaps, and activating product cards for agentic shopping. If you want the platform side of this workflow in one place, GEOly AI runs the audit, the AIGVR tracking, and the monitoring, with an agent-native MCP server for teams that automate. Start free at app.geoly.ai, and check pricing when you're ready to scale beyond the trial.
FAQ
How is GEO different from SEO?
SEO optimizes to rank a link on a results page; GEO optimizes to be named and cited inside an AI-generated answer. The underlying signals overlap — clean crawlability, structured data, authoritative content — but success in GEO is measured by mentions, citations, and share of the answer rather than position and clicks. Most brands run both.
Do I need to finish everything in exactly 30 days?
No. The four-week structure is a sequence, not a deadline. If you only get through the audit, an llms.txt file, and a few answer-first pages in your first month, you've done the highest-value work. The dates matter less than the order: measure, fix technical basics, improve content, then monitor.
Which AI engines should a beginner track first?
Track where your customers actually ask questions. For most DTC brands that means ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview first, then Perplexity and Gemini. A platform that covers all seven engines at once saves you from guessing, and the metrics guide explains what each score means. See more under AI search.
Is llms.txt an official standard yet?
It's a widely adopted community proposal rather than a formal standard, and not every engine reads it today. It still costs almost nothing to publish and gives compliant agents a clean map of your site, which is why it's in Week 2. Pair it with schema markup so you're covered either way. More context under GEO.
