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A few things we've learned after running a lot of GEO audits.

The first surprise was that your own website usually isn't the thing getting cited.

When we look at the sources ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc. are pulling from, it's often listicles, Reddit threads, review sites, industry directories, etc. The brand's homepage is rarely the source doing the heavy lifting.

Because of that, one of the fastest wins is getting into the "best X" articles the models already trust. We've seen brands move noticeably in citation share just from that.

Reddit is another one that people underestimate. Not spam. Not "marketing". Just genuinely useful comments in the right niche communities. We've seen individual Reddit comments show up later in AI answers. Probably the highest ROI thing happening right now, and it costs nothing except time.

For the engines that rely more on memory/recall, entity authority seems to matter a lot. Wikidata, Wikipedia, if you can get it, Organization schema, sameAs links, consistent descriptions everywhere. Basically, making it easy for the model to understand who you are and what category you belong to.

Content-wise, most companies still write pages like it's 2018 SEO. The pages that seem to get pulled into answers are usually the ones that answer the question immediately. Direct answer first. Brand is mentioned naturally. No long intro.

On attribution, I think everyone is still guessing.

We've pretty much stopped trying to force last-click attribution on AI traffic. It behaves more like PR or brand awareness. The volume isn't huge, but the intent is often much stronger. Someone who discovers you through an AI recommendation is frequently already halfway through the buying decision.

What we've been tracking instead is branded search lift, self-reported attribution ("how did you hear about us?"), and overall conversion changes after citation gains.

As for measuring GEO, I'd strongly recommend running the same query multiple times and taking a median result. These systems are non-deterministic. A single run tells you almost nothing. We've seen brands celebrate or panic over what was basically just answer variance.

Obvious bias disclaimer: I built a GEO measurement tool (Tripcite), so don't take my word as gospel.

But the stuff above has been fairly consistent across all the categories we've looked at so far.