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The GEO Sprint: 7 Days to Make Your Brand Cite-Worthy for ChatGPT and Perplexity

Feb 17, 2026

Full Transcript

The GEO Sprint — 7 Days to Become Cite-Worthy

Show: Emarketed
Host: Alex
Episode Format: Solo
Runtime: ~10 minutes

[INTRO MUSIC — 8s upbeat tech]

Cold Open & Intro

What if I told you that right now, an AI is answering a question about your industry — and your brand isn't even in the conversation? Not because your product isn't good. But because you're invisible to the models that are shaping buying decisions.

Today, I'm giving you the exact seven-day playbook to fix that.

Welcome to Emarketed. I'm Alex, and this show is for founders who want their brand to actually show up where it matters — in AI-generated answers. Let's get into it.

What Is GEO?

Before we dive into the sprint, let me quickly level-set on what GEO actually is. Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of making your content visible to AI-powered search engines — tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.

Traditional SEO gets you ranked in a list of blue links. GEO gets you cited inside the actual answer. And that distinction matters more than most founders realize.

When someone asks Perplexity, "what's the best CRM for startups," the AI doesn't show ten results. It synthesizes one answer and cites maybe three or four sources. If you're one of those cited sources, you're not just visible — you're endorsed.

That's the game we're playing. And the good news is, you don't need a massive budget or a team of specialists. You need seven focused days. So let's break it down.

Day 1: Audit Your AI Visibility

Before you optimize anything, you need a baseline. Go to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews, and type in the five to ten queries your ideal customer would ask about your category. Not branded queries about your company — category queries. Things like, "best project management tool for remote teams," or, "how to choose a CRM for startups."

Screenshot every result. Note whether your brand appears, whether competitors appear, and what sources the AI is actually citing. This is your citation gap analysis.

Action: Document your visibility across at least three AI platforms, and identify which competitors are getting cited instead of you.

Expected outcome: By tonight, you should have a clear picture of your starting point.

Day 2: Claim Your Entity Signals

AI models build an internal knowledge graph of entities — people, brands, products. Your job today is to make sure your entity signals are consistent and strong across the web.

Start with your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn company page, your Crunchbase listing, and any relevant directories. Make sure your brand name, founding date, key personnel, and core product descriptions are consistent everywhere. Then check Wikipedia. You don't need a full Wikipedia page, but if your brand is notable enough, a mention in a relevant article helps significantly.

Action: Audit and update your brand presence on at least five authoritative platforms.

Expected outcome: You're strengthening the entity graph that AI models pull from when deciding who to cite.

Day 3: Structure Your Homepage and Key Pages

AI models extract information more reliably from well-structured pages. Today, you're adding Schema.org JSON-LD markup to your homepage and top landing pages. At minimum, add Organization schema, FAQ schema if you have a FAQ section, and Article schema on your blog posts.

Here's why this matters: studies show that GPT-4's accuracy in extracting brand information jumps from sixteen percent to fifty-four percent when structured data is present. That's a massive difference.

Action: Implement or update Schema markup on your top five pages. Validate everything using Google's Rich Results Test.

Expected outcome: By end of day, your key pages should be machine-readable in a way they weren't before.

Day 4: Create Your llms.txt File

This is a newer tactic that's gaining serious traction. An llms.txt file is a plain text markdown file you place at the root of your domain. Think of it as a curated table of contents for AI agents. It lists your most important pages with brief descriptions, helping AI crawlers understand what your site offers without parsing every page of HTML.

Action: Create an llms.txt file that includes your top ten to fifteen pages, organized by category. Include a brief one-line summary for each. Then make sure your robots.txt file allows key AI bots to access your site. If you're blocking GPTBot or PerplexityBot, you're blocking your visibility.

Emarketed actually has a free llms.txt generator tool that makes this dead simple. I'll drop the link at the end.

Day 5: Publish Citation-Worthy Content

But not just any content — you need content that's structured for extraction. AI models love bullet lists, numbered steps, clear definitions, statistics with sources, and expert quotes.

Write one comprehensive piece targeting a question your ideal customer asks. Make it the definitive answer. Include at least three original data points or statistics. Add a clear "key takeaways" section at the top. Structure with H2 and H3 headers that match natural language queries.

This isn't about word count. A twelve-hundred-word piece that's perfectly structured will outperform a five-thousand-word wall of text every time.

Action: Publish one piece of citation-optimized content.

Expected outcome: You now have at least one page designed specifically to be extracted and cited by AI models.

Day 6: Build External Authority Signals

AI models don't just look at your site — they look at who's talking about you. Today, focus on getting one or two mentions on authoritative external sources.

Pitch a guest post to an industry publication. Get quoted in a journalist's piece through platforms like HARO or Connectively. Post a thoughtful, data-backed answer on Reddit or Quora in your niche.

The key is quality over quantity. One mention on a high-authority site is worth more than fifty mentions on low-quality directories.

Action: Secure at least one external mention or pitch by end of day.

Expected outcome: You're building the off-site authority signals that AI models weigh heavily when deciding who deserves a citation.

Day 7: Measure and Set Your Cadence

Go back and repeat the same audit you did on day one. Run those same five to ten queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Compare your new results to your baseline.

Are you showing up in more answers? Are the AI models citing you where they weren't before? Even small gains after one week are a strong signal.

The real action for day seven isn't just measurement — it's setting up a monthly cadence. GEO isn't a one-time project. Content gets stale. AI models update. You need to refresh your key content quarterly, monitor your citation share monthly, and keep building authority signals continuously.

Case Examples

Example 1: A B2B SaaS startup in the project management space. Before their sprint, they searched "best project management tools for startups" on ChatGPT and Perplexity — and they were nowhere. After seven days of adding structured data, publishing one comprehensive comparison guide, and getting mentioned in a SaaS review roundup, they started appearing in Perplexity's citations within two weeks. Their AI referral traffic went from zero to over four hundred sessions in the first month, with a conversion rate above six percent.

Example 2: A direct-to-consumer wellness brand selling supplements. They created an llms.txt file, restructured their FAQ page with Schema markup, and published a data-backed article on their signature ingredient. Within ten days, when users asked AI assistants about that ingredient category, the brand started showing up as a cited source. Their branded search volume increased twenty-three percent because people were discovering them through AI answers first, and then searching for more.

Sprint Recap

  • Day 1: Audit your current AI visibility to establish your baseline.
  • Day 2: Claim and clean up your entity signals across the web.
  • Day 3: Implement structured data markup on your key pages.
  • Day 4: Create and deploy your llms.txt file.
  • Day 5: Publish one piece of citation-optimized content.
  • Day 6: Build external authority through mentions and earned media.
  • Day 7: Measure your progress and set your ongoing monthly cadence.

Seven days, seven actions, each one building on the last. You're not just doing random tactics — you're building a compounding visibility engine.

Common Mistakes

Mistake 1: Treating it like traditional SEO. GEO isn't about keywords and backlinks. It's about being the best answer to a question, structured in a way machines can extract.

Mistake 2: Blocking AI crawlers. I still see companies with robots.txt files that block GPTBot and ClaudeBot. If you block them, you don't exist to them. It's that simple.

Mistake 3: Ignoring measurement. If you're not tracking your citation share across AI platforms monthly, you're flying blind. You can't improve what you don't measure.

CTA & Outro

If you want to see exactly where your brand stands right now, head over to Emarketed and check out their AI Visibility Score. It gives you a concrete baseline in minutes.

And if you want to knock out Day 4 of this sprint instantly, use their free llms.txt generator at emarketed.com/tools/llms-txt-generator. Links are in the show notes.

That's the GEO Sprint — seven days to become cite-worthy.

I'm Alex. Thanks for listening to Emarketed, and I'll catch you in the next one.

[OUTRO MUSIC — 6s, softer tech theme]

Show Notes