When a user asks ChatGPT "what's a good custom merch platform," whether your brand shows up in the answer is quickly becoming more important than your Google ranking.

That's the problem GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — exists to solve.

The rules of search have changed

Traditional SEO gets people to click through to your site; GEO gets models to cite you when they generate answers. The optimization logic is completely different:

  • SEO optimizes ranking signals: backlinks, keywords, Core Web Vitals
  • GEO optimizes citability: structured facts, clear entity definitions, AI-crawler accessibility

A counterintuitive conclusion: for GEO, a cleanly marked-up FAQ can be worth more than a 10,000-word deep dive — because models cite passages, not pages.

The three levers of GEO

  1. Let AI crawlers in: robots.txt allowances for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot, plus an llms.txt declaration
  2. Make content citable: self-contained paragraphs, each able to answer one question on its own
  3. Make your brand an entity: build a stable brand-category association in authoritative sources

Why I built FasterGEO

The GEO tools on the market are either consulting reports in a trench coat or absurdly overpriced. So I broke the whole methodology down into an open-source toolkit: 11 npm packages plus an MCP server, covering detection, optimization, and monitoring end to end.

Building in public — all the code is on GitHub.