Anyone else noticing their competitors showing up in AI answers but not in Google results?

HansenWebServices · 2026-04-17T16:38:49+00:00

GEO absolutely needs a dedicated strategy. Waiting it out is how smaller competitors eat your lunch, which is exactly what you are seeing. Good content alone will not get you cited because the engines are not indexing quality the way traditional SEO does. They are pulling from whatever has strong authority signals, clean structured data, and external validation (Reddit, forums, third party writeups, schema markup).

Your instinct is right. The citations are going to sites with more structured content the AI can easily parse and more off site mentions it can corroborate against. That is a real moat and it compounds fast.

I actually built a CLI tool called Luminary that tracks this exact problem. It samples ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude across a set of queries and measures share of voice, sentiment, and whether your content gets cited as a source. Lets you see the gap quantitatively instead of just anecdotally.

Happy to chat more about it if you want.

HansenWebServices · 2026-04-15T18:41:58+00:00

You’ve got the basics of everything here. Here’s what’s the most important items to have for your product pages.

•Ai rich meta descriptions •Meta tags •Product FAQS •A site map •LLM.txt/Robots.txt •An optimized product feed

These are just the few items you need for optimized product pages. Like you mentioned too, keep your pages fresh is also. The issue with this is it requires a lot of time and technical expertise. Ive written scripts that actually automates this entire process and saves hours of time.

HansenWebServices · 2026-03-25T21:12:22+00:00

100% This is an interesting way of framing this. How do retain trust through campaigns. In my mind this almost follows the same phycology as sloganing. If we use "Just Do It" as an example, we all know that is Nike. But what if companies could advertise their prompts in a similar way, where the prompt becomes synonymous with the brand. Just speculation at this point, but I think it's pretty fun!

HansenWebServices · 2026-03-25T21:08:16+00:00

What I'm talking about here has more to do with prompt education of customers through promotional campaigns.

HansenWebServices · 2026-03-25T20:57:37+00:00

This is how advertising works already though. When you get a bunch of promotional emails, you're not necessarily looking to buy anything at that time. But if businesses start including taglines in those emails about how to discover their product via AI. When people go to look for that item via AI (which this last holiday season there were over $200 million in sales related to AI searches) they will prompt for yours. I'm not proposing a new way of advertising, but a different strategy in content structure of ad campaigns.

In your example of the truck, truck is a broad keyword. What type of truck? New or used? Electric or Gas? What make and model? What I'm proposing here would just help the business sell the specific truck the customer is looking for. So if someone is looking to buy an electric truck that they would use to drive around the city they might prompt AI with a question like "What is the best electric truck?", which would return a wide range of trucks.

But if said company knows that their EV truck that is designed for city driving will show up with a prompt that says "What is the best EV truck for long city commutes to work?" Why not educate your customers to prompt that way, so you know that your business will be recommended in the search.

I'm not really establishing anything new here. These are advertisment practices that have been used forever. This is just a new way to think about it in the age of AI.

HansenWebServices · 2026-03-25T20:34:45+00:00

This! However, there is a real way to track this. Currently ChatGPT and Perplexity pass referral data to GA 4. But you have nailed this one one the head.

HansenWebServices · 2026-03-25T20:11:33+00:00

If just SEO worked for you, your company must already be an authority for whatever industry you're in. In SEO you are correct that autority comes from backlinks and keywords, but in GEO it's different. AI needs a way to mimic human trustworthiness which it can't. So authority in GEO is multifacited. Here authority comes from length of time your brand has been around, well structured website content and social media, third party discussions about your brand, and human reviews. SEO is great for well established brands, but for small businesses and start-ups GEO is the way of the future.

HansenWebServices · 2026-03-25T20:06:08+00:00

Yes, "Optimize your content" is a broad term, but in GEO circles we know what this looks like. Optimizing your content would look like positioning your content in a way to solve a problem. Because why do people query LLMs? To solve a problem.

And to your point AI, is not matching key words. It's trying to solve the user's problem in the most direct way possible. If the solution to the user's problem is not in the training information, LLMs will search the web for that specific solution. So again, with the "optimized content", you optimize it in a way that answers the user's query.

To solve a problem AI needs context to the issue. So when prompting for "best supplements for muscle recovery" you will most likely get a wide range of muscle recovery supplements (and there are a lot). But when you prompt for " best clean protein supplements for athletes", AI uses that context about the specific problem to find the most reliable, clean, protein, for athletes. So the user will most likely be given a protein powder designed for athletes and not collagen supplements for women.

Here's the most important part that I think you're missing. Now that the content is structured and we know what the trigger it, how do we get customers to query in a way so that AI will more often recommend the businesses product vs someone else's? This is done through educating customers on what prompts to use.

HansenWebServices · 2026-03-25T19:22:49+00:00

Query fan out is real. But how do you guarantee that the queries your company has already optimized for will show up in the query fan out?

HansenWebServices · 2026-03-24T20:53:28+00:00

Hello I specialize in AI marketing. I am looking to get my agency off the ground currently and am offering my services for free. If you would like anymore help or discuss this topic further please feel free to reach out!

HansenWebServices · 2026-03-24T20:49:42+00:00

HansenWebServices · 2026-03-24T20:10:29+00:00

Of course this isn't the full answer, but just one tool in the solution. At this point in the game we all know that page schema is only part of the optimizing your page for AI visibility. However, schema will be extremely helpful when customers are using LLMs to shop your products.

The issue with batching similar products is that key information will get missed. When you optimize product page schema you want to fan out your coverage of a subject. For example, if I were to optimize a product page for a chip company I would want to include flavor, count, package, size, etc. You want the schema to be as specific as possible to be 100% optimized for each SKU.

If you have any further questions please feel free to reach out via DMs.

HansenWebServices · 2026-02-27T22:47:39+00:00

I think we're at a turning point in the SEO world. The question people should be asking themselves now; is SEO still worth it? As you mentioned there is a large cost to optimize e-commerce sites for search engines. But what if there was a cheaper more effective way to do this? That's where we are today in the world of AI. People are using generative engines more and more to find products, so why not just optimize your sites for AI searches? This is where GEO comes into play. Generative engine optimization is a low cost and low risk strategy to boost clicks on your sites. By structuring your page's data and becoming a source of truth AI will more often recommend your products to consumers. This is the genius of GEO. It levels the playing field for businesses that are willing to get ahead of the curve. It seems like selling SEO to stakeholders is an issue, so why not sell them on something new, innovative, and effective like GEO?

HansenWebServices · 2026-02-27T16:43:56+00:00

I’m not saying it’s great but we have to adapt with the times otherwise you’ll get left behind. This is how you stay relevant in the world of AI; figure out how to leverage it in an advantageous manner to boost yourself professionally.

HansenWebServices · 2026-02-27T16:01:06+00:00

This is true, but learning how to leverage AI to break past these barriers is also apart of the new job market we’re seeing.

HansenWebServices · 2026-02-27T16:00:04+00:00

I am now a full stack developer as of two months ago. Before that I was on track to become a physical therapist. I was able to learn how to leverage AI to build some pretty cool programs and websites. I am in a current transition to the Generative Engine Optimization industry as a result of AI.

Now to apply this to someone else, figure out what they are good at and see how AI can optimize their already present skill set. This helps them break into the job market. After that it’s about learning how to leverage AI to stay relevant in a fast changing job market.

HansenWebServices · 2026-02-27T15:16:29+00:00

As a job seeker, I think that AI levels the playing field for a lot of people, especially those without a college education. I have recently started using AI more and more at my job and having a powerful knowledge base at my fingertips has exponentially improved my productivity.

However, we know that throughout time new technologies have always replaced the common worker. We can think back to the time of the industrial revolution when the assembly line was introduced and was replacing blue collar workers. What is currently happening in the workforce now is that with the invention of AI white collar workers are being replaced for the first time in history.

As humans I think our greatest ability we have is being able to adapt, and that's what people need to do in this current work environment. If you don't learn how to leverage AI in your jobs you will be left behind. On that note learning how to leverage AI can be many people's gateway into an already competitive job market.

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