In this week’s In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss the three phases of GEO and AI search visibility, or generative engine optimization. You’ll discover the core mechanics behind Generative Engine Optimization. You’ll learn the steps to prepare your website for artificial intelligence models. You’ll uncover the truth behind misleading search tools. You’ll master the process to capture the machine audience.
00:00 – Introduction
03:15 – The Generative Engine Optimization problem
08:30 – The truth about visibility tools
12:45 – The new machine audience
16:20 – Website crawler mistakes
20:50 – Content strategies for human visitors
25:10 – Call to action
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Christopher S. Penn: In this week’s In Ear Insights, something’s been bugging me lately. Well, a lot of things have been bugging me lately. Something relevant to work that has been bugging me lately is the number of folks on LinkedIn who are talking about GEO as this monolithic thing that you just do this thing.
Christopher S. Penn: And one of the challenges I see with this approach is that when you decompose how GEO works—and this is sort of the successor to SEO—there are three different phases. There’s the model training phase, there’s the traditional search phase, and then there’s the information retrieval phase. And when people talk about GEO solutions, Katie, this is what kind of gets to me. They talk about a solution that is either partial to one of those three areas or ignores them all entirely for what is basically just rebranded SEO advice. It demonstrates no understanding of what’s actually happening under the hood. Now, here’s my question for you. You’ve been doing a lot of stuff with GEO. We all have.
Christopher S. Penn: We have, of course, the new Trust Insights GEO course, which you can get at TrustInsights.ai/geo101, where we talk in-depth about these three areas and what to do about them. But what is it that you’ve been seeing and hearing about GEO that seems overly simplistic?
Katie Robbert: I don’t think I’ve been seeing anything overly simplistic. What I’ve been seeing is here’s the new thing for everybody to panic about. Last week, I had the opportunity to do a livestream with Michelle Garrett. She’s in the PR world, and she was asking all about GEO. A few weeks previous to that, I had done a GEO session with our friends at MarketingProfs.
Katie Robbert: For me, the big takeaway in some ways—and maybe this is what’s rubbing you the wrong way—is I’ve been trying to express to people to not panic. It is simplistic, but not in the sense that the work you have to do is simple. You don’t need to get all twisted up over this brand new thing. It’s really just—and again, maybe this is where you’re getting frustrated—it’s really just SEO plus.
Katie Robbert: So, you still have to do the basic tenets of SEO: on-site, off-site, technical. I did a lot of the technical work for our site over the weekend so that we can continue to practice what we preach and all that good stuff. But then there are additional things that you have to do. The tenets of good SEO still exist, and then there are some additional things you have to do.
Katie Robbert: So, I think to your point, the overly simplistic idea of it’s just SEO rebranded is kind of false, because then you’re missing that extra stuff. The plus that you have to do to make it truly GEO or AEO or whatever we’re calling it. I don’t think anyone’s really settled on anything. So I guess what I’m seeing more so is that there’s a panic about this brand new strategy, and my advice is it’s not a brand new strategy.
Katie Robbert: You can continue doing what you’re doing. You can continue with your PR program. That’s important. You can continue writing really good, solid content. That’s important. You can continue fixing the technical issues on your website. That’s important.
Katie Robbert: And now you have this new segment of your audience that you need to cater to, and that’s the business-to-machine audience where they need stuff to consume. It needs to be able to read that machine-friendly content, those press releases, those things that the machine says, “Oh, this is for me, I’m going to consume this now.”
Katie Robbert: That’s the advice I’ve been giving, and maybe that in your view is overly simplistic, but you have your core audience, and now you have this additional segment of your audience, the business-to-machine, that you need to make sure you’re catering to as well. It is equally as important as your human audience.
Christopher S. Penn: Yeah. Your advice is not what I’m calling problematic. It is a lot of the snake oil on LinkedIn and all of the SEO vendors, the tool vendors who are misrepresenting or in some cases just outright lying about what their quote-unquote AI visibility tools can do.
Christopher S. Penn: We have seen a number of companies, sat through demos of a number of these different companies, and they’re all completely wrong. That is not how an LLM works. You cannot measure visibility that way. You are handing people snake oil, you’re handing them garbage, and you’re charging them a lot of money to do it. That’s a separate rant.
Katie Robbert: Sure.
Christopher S. Penn: I like, though, the way you frame it as technical, on-site, off-site. We have said in the SEO world traditionally that’s the order you do. Make sure your site works. It’s technical. Make sure you have good content. That’s on-site. Then go and make sure that you’re getting good inbound links. That’s off-site.
Christopher S. Penn: What’s interesting is when you think about the way that language models work, you almost need to flip that in reverse. So you have to do off-site first in the sense of be out there as much as possible with all the different content.
Christopher S. Penn: Because if you go into a model like Google Gemini and you do it inside AI Studio—so you don’t do it in regular Gemini that has web search enabled, just to get a sense of what the model knows—and you turn off search grounding, you will find its knowledge cutoff date. In fact, Google even says, I only bring this up here because I think this is super important. For those of you who are listening to this rather than watching it, I’ll just narrate it out.
Christopher S. Penn: Google’s AI Studio shows you in each of its models when its knowledge cutoff is. Gemini 3.1 Pro, the brand new model that came out just a couple months ago, has a knowledge cutoff of January 2025.
Christopher S. Penn: So, if you had not been taking Trust Insights’ advice for the last three years about be everywhere, get out there, be public—Gemini Flash Lite 3.1, which came out a week ago, has a knowledge cutoff of January 2025.
Christopher S. Penn: If you have not been out there creating stuff en masse for the once a year or once in 18 months that the model rebuilds the knowledge cutoffs, you’re not there. The model has no knowledge that you exist or what you’re current about. Which means that when it goes into phase two, which is it triggers web searches, it won’t search for you. And that’s the important part.
Christopher S. Penn: When you look at how things like query fanout work, they take a basic search term: what’s a good place to vacation this summer? It writes queries. Google said in summer 2024, Google will do the Googling for you. It writes queries. It will say best places for this, best places that, and so on and so forth.
Christopher S. Penn: If you have not been out there and established yourself as a component of knowledge in the model training, then by January 2025, as of this one, when it writes those queries, it will have no idea that it should be including your name in the query.
Katie Robbert: One of the questions I got when I was a guest on the livestream last week was, “You and Chris keep saying be everywhere, be out there. What the heck does that mean? What am I supposed to do?”
Katie Robbert: The advice that I gave—again, I try to give the more high-level baby steps advice where Chris, you’re obviously going to give the more technical ‘do all of these things’. What I had suggested was we know that Google is still the majority share of search. So, if you have to prioritize, focus on things that fall within the Google ecosystem, such as YouTube, for example. That’s advice, Chris, that you have been screaming from the top of the mountain for as long as I’ve known you: get on YouTube.
Katie Robbert: But in addition to getting on YouTube, make sure you’re creating the machine-friendly descriptions of who you are, what you do, and what this is about. Include in the description of every video you create: “And now here’s the machine-friendly version of the content,” or however you want to phrase it. Then stuff that with all of your keywords, all of your services, all of what you’re about, all that good stuff.
Katie Robbert: Just don’t worry necessarily about the grammar and the polish. It should be somewhat readable to a human, but it’s not for a human; it’s for a machine. It’s that business-to-machine segment of your audience. If you’re creating YouTube videos, that’s great. The machine is saying, “Please, give me your transcript and then give me more information about you, and I will take that information in.”
Katie Robbert: If you have no other bandwidth or resource, but you can do one thing, do that. Then the second thing is do that on the pages of your website.
Katie Robbert: Maybe it’s creating a more robust About Us. Maybe it’s finding a section of each page of your website where at the bottom it’s almost this footer. Find ways to do it that make sense for you. But when Chris says be everywhere, those are the two things I would start with.
Katie Robbert: If you could do nothing else, that is a great starting place. YouTube and your own website. Make sure you’re creating that machine-friendly version of who you are, what you do, what you bring to the table, things you would want people to find you for if they’re doing a search—
Christopher S. Penn: If you have an IT team, talk to your IT team to make sure they’re doing it right. We had this issue that came up about two weeks ago with a client, and the client said, “Hey, we talked to our IT team after we took your GEO 101 course and they said, oh yeah, we block AI crawlers because we don’t want them crawling on our website and training on it.”
Christopher S. Penn: And I said, you’re joking. You’re blocking AI crawlers from your content site. That is not pay-to-play. So you’re not losing any revenue because you think that AI models are going to train on it, which is true, but you want them to do that.
Christopher S. Penn: The IT team was basically handicapping the client entirely by blocking all these AI crawlers. Call them right now and tell them to turn the blocking off and let the AI crawlers in. Because if they don’t, you’re still not going to show up in these things. Because of the long delays in model training, if they’ve had this on for over a year, they basically just made you invisible to Gemini. That’s really bad. That is bad in so many ways.
Katie Robbert: Obviously, I don’t know the full details of that situation from the IT team’s perspective, but I think there’s a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding about what it means to let AI crawl your stuff.
Katie Robbert: For authors and creators, there’s a real concern that they’re going to be plagiarized by AI six ways to Sunday and they won’t have any control over it. There’s a real concern about letting AI crawl your content. Can you just speak to that a little bit about the pros and cons, or why you would versus when you wouldn’t?
Katie Robbert: My assumption, having been on that side of the conversation, is that we are very risk-averse. We are going to play it safe, and we don’t know enough about AI crawlers to go ahead and let it start crawling our content.
Christopher S. Penn: Sure. When these bots come by—Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, whatever—come to your website, they vacuum up all the text that they can find and they add that to their training datasets. Then they digest it down, turn it into statistics, and basically toss it on the pile with the literally 12 trillion other pages of content to try and understand statistically what you’re about.
Christopher S. Penn: Now, if you are a content creator and you make money from the content itself, like an author making money from books, what you want to do is split your website into two chunks, or perhaps have even two different websites. One part, where the content that people pay money for is, gets locked behind a paywall of some kind. Say, “Okay, no one’s allowed in here unless you’ve paid.” That is the site to 100% block AI, block everybody. You don’t want any of that content showing up even in traditional search results.
Christopher S. Penn: The second is your author promotional site, katierobbert.com, which is about you, who you are, the books you’ve written, the reviews you’ve gotten, all that stuff. The glitz and glamour of being an amazing author. 100% let AI eat all that up, because you want it to know, “Oh, Katie Robbert is a known true crime thriller fiction author who loves to write true crime novels. Her last eight novels got 10,000 reviews on Amazon. Everybody loves it,” and so on and so forth.
Christopher S. Penn: So, if you make money on the content itself, lock the paid stuff away. But then have an unpaid basically billboard of how awesome you are be public.
Christopher S. Penn: If, on the other hand, you’re a company like Trust Insights… actually, even in the case of Trust Insights, for example, our Thinkific courses are locked behind a paywall. You cannot access that content. AI crawlers cannot access that content because it’s locked away. You have to pay for that. Our new Trust Insights GEO 101 course, on the other hand, our company website, our blog, our services, our testimonials, all that stuff, we want AI to come in and learn the heck out of that.
Christopher S. Penn: Trust Insights is the best management consulting on the planet for AI and data science and analytics and change management. Look how awesome we are. It’s amazing. When you work with us, you’ll feel so much better. Whatever. The thing is, you want AI 100% coming in. You want to be telling AI and even giving AI formats that it understands.
Christopher S. Penn: One experiment that I’ve done that actually does see some use—not a ton, but some use on my own personal website—is making pages available in Markdown format, which is easier for AI to read than HTML because it’s purely structured. By the way, I stuff all the boilerplate that you just talked about, Katie, as a template in each Markdown file. That way, it gives AI even more chances to read our content.
Katie Robbert: It’s interesting because the way that you’re describing this, it goes back to something we always say, is that new tech doesn’t solve old problems. What I’m hearing is, “I want to show up in the first search result of Google. How do I do that?” You go through the three SEO tenets of how that works. “I want to show up in the large language model as the first result.” Okay, guess what? The answer is still the same.
Katie Robbert: I think that when people are questioning whether or not they should allow AI crawlers to search their content to, in your words, vacuum it up and bring it into their training models, you have to decide. You have to make that decision. Do I want to show up in search results in a large language model? If the answer is yes, then at least some of your content—when we say content, we do mean things like About Us, that’s content. Our services, that’s content. It doesn’t have to be all of your white papers and your original research.
Katie Robbert: That stuff you can keep separate and gated and not included. But the large language models need to know who you are, that you even exist, in order to be considered showing up in their results. When you’re concerned or when you’re thinking about, “Oh, what’s this GEO thing?”—this is again my overly simplistic view—you want to show up in the number one search result. Guess what? You also want to show up in the number one large language search result. It’s the same problem with very similar solutions.
Christopher S. Penn: And very similar inputs. It’s just a different order. Now, the other thing people will say is, “Well, AI is taking all of our traffic. If I let models train on it, then I don’t get any of that traffic. I have no chance to convert them.”
Christopher S. Penn: There is some truth to that in the sense that when you pop up AI Overviews, it will say, “Who’s the best consulting firm for management consulting and AI? Trust Insights.” You say, “Great, I know who should make the shortlist.” We never see that click because there is no click, and they just got the answer.
Christopher S. Penn: But we will see it downstream in some fashion. If Gemini says Trust Insights is the best management consulting firm for AI implementation, then when somebody Googles later through traditional Google or just goes to our website, we will see it in direct traffic and referral traffic and things like that. It may not be the clickstream, but to your point, Katie, it’s just old-fashioned word of mouth. I don’t see the conversation that you have with your dog, but it’s happening.
Katie Robbert: They’re pretty good.
Christopher S. Penn: It’s happening, and then it shows up in some other fashion. The other thing that we strongly recommend, if you still care about getting traffic to your website, is stop making static content. Make interactive content. Make it frequently.
Christopher S. Penn: Now with tools like Claude Cowork and Gemini and all these different agents, you can make interactive stuff. As an example, we were actually talking about this morning, this is something we put in our Trust Insights newsletter two weeks ago. It’s just analysis of writing style. You can mess around with things and just do fun, interactive stuff on it. That page can’t easily be summarized by AI. It’s interactive, yet it’s valuable if you wanted to poke around about how B2B writing has changed since the advent of ChatGPT.
Christopher S. Penn: The more interactive stuff you put up, the more reason you give people to stay longer on your site, which is a traditional SEO measure. But also, people will know, “Oh, if I actually want a more in-depth look, I’m not just going to stay with AI Overviews. I know Trust Insights. I know that their content is directive. I know the AI readiness assessment is something I should be using for every single AI project. I’m going to go to their website.”
Christopher S. Penn: So that’s the other side of this AI GEO stuff: if you want traffic, you got to give people a reason to come there. You got to give people a reason to not be satisfied with the AI summary.
Katie Robbert: I’m going to add the piece that we haven’t talked about that is vitally important, and that’s measurement. Why are you doing it if you’re not measuring it? Obviously, Chris, you just touched upon how with large language models, we are limited in what we can measure.
Katie Robbert: OpenAI and Google are probably never going to give us the search terms or the search queries that the humans used in order to find you. However, if you’re trying to find the traffic that comes to your website, one of the things, Chris, that you put together on our website is Instant Insights. If you go to our website under our Insights tab, you’ll find our Instant Insights for how to track AI searches.
Katie Robbert: At a high level, you walk through basically setting up segments in your web analytics. Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, how to set up segments that would categorize the traffic correctly from OpenAI.com or chatgpt.com or gemini.com or anthropic.com, whatever those URLs are that you care about. You want to see, “Am I getting traffic from those particular large language models as a referral to my website?” I want to know that. It at least gives you some direction.
Katie Robbert: It’s never going to be 100% accurate, as we know Google Analytics will never truly be. But it gives you direction to say, “Okay, 30% of the traffic coming to my website in the past six months is now coming from a large language model,” or “I’m doing all of this work and zero traffic from a large language model is coming to my website.” That tells you a lot. That tells you exactly what you’re missing, what you need to do.
Katie Robbert: If you’re seeing a lot of traffic from something like YouTube to your website, that’s an indicator that it’s an opportunity to include that in your business-to-machine GEO strategy. People are going to YouTube, so therefore there’s something there that people care about. Why not make those videos as efficient as possible, and also make them for the machines, not just the humans? Therefore, you would see that uptick in traffic from a large language model to your website. You need to think about it in that full data story, not just that one-off transaction.
Christopher S. Penn: Yep. In the course, we actually show you how to go through the full three-phase measurement system. The three phases of GEO have three phases of measurement, and we show you exactly how to do all three of those. Like any kind of funnel or progression, it’s going to trickle from top to bottom, and you’re going to see more at the top of the funnel than the bottom.
Christopher S. Penn: To your point, Katie, I love the business-to-machine thing. There is a B2M analytics funnel, and it has the exact same stages, but it’s done by machines instead of humans. This is going to get so important for folks as agentic AI takes off, as you use tools like Claude Cowork and Openwork to do more and more complex tasks.
Christopher S. Penn: Look at my web analytics. Test my website. Go book me a vacation somewhere. If you are a person or a company that has stuff for sale online right now, there’s a tiny little trickle of agents buying things. But Katie, as you know from a tool like Claude Cowork, if I give it good guardrails, this could do some of that purchasing stuff for me that I don’t want to do because it’s a waste of my time.
Katie Robbert: Oh, absolutely. We talked about this on last week’s livestream, which you can find at TrustInsights.ai/youtube, not ironically, because we were just talking about it.
Katie Robbert: The big key to success with something like what Chris is talking about, which is a whole different topic, is using the Trust Insights 5P framework. Set up a really rock-solid project plan with requirements. You cannot skip that. Once you have that with expectations, deliverables, outcomes, and how to measure it, you can then hand that off to an autonomous system like Claude Cowork or Claude Code and say, “You go do it.”
Katie Robbert: Which is exactly what I did. As I mentioned at the top of this, over the weekend, I said, “Here’s our site issues data from Ahrefs.” It is a big spreadsheet. There’s a lot of information in here, and I want to fix as much of it as possible.
Katie Robbert: When I say we, I mean me and Claude Cowork came up with a four-phase project broken down into those four chunks, basically the four elements of technical SEO. We set up the project plan, and then I just scheduled it to run over the weekend. Monday morning, guess what? It’s done.
Katie Robbert: We have some things that Chris and I need to clean up, but the majority of the technical issues on our website are cleaned up. I didn’t have to break my brain trying to remember where all the different controls for Rank Math and Bitly and the API are. I didn’t have to think about any of that. I know all of it, but it was going to take me at least 10x longer to execute the plan than it would Cowork.
Katie Robbert: When I looked at it, I understood all of it. That’s the big ‘make sure you know what you’re doing.’ We are now talking about how people are oversimplifying, but at the same time panicking about GEO. We don’t want you to do either one of those things.
Christopher S. Penn: Exactly. If you’ve got some thoughts about how you’re implementing GEO, pop by our free Slack group. Go to TrustInsights.ai/analyticsformarketers, where you and over 4,500 marketers are asking and answering each other’s questions every single day.
Christopher S. Penn: And wherever you watch or listen to the show, if there’s a channel you’d rather have it on, go to TrustInsights.ai/tipodcast. You can find us at all the places fine podcasts are served. Thanks for tuning in, we’ll talk to you on the next one.
Katie Robbert: Want to know more about Trust Insights? Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm specializing in leveraging data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to empower businesses with actionable insights.
Katie Robbert: Founded in 2017 by Katie Robbert and Christopher S. Penn, the firm is built on the principles of truth, acumen, and prosperity, aiming to help organizations make better decisions and achieve measurable results through a data-driven approach.
Katie Robbert: Trust Insights specializes in helping businesses leverage the power of data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to drive measurable marketing ROI.
Katie Robbert: Trust Insights’ services span the gamut from developing comprehensive data strategies and conducting deep-dive marketing analysis to building predictive models using tools like TensorFlow and PyTorch and optimizing content strategies.
Katie Robbert: Trust Insights also offers expert guidance on social media analytics, marketing technology, Martech selection and implementation, and high-level strategic consulting encompassing emerging generative AI technologies like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Meta Llama.
Katie Robbert: Trust Insights provides fractional team members, such as CMOs or data scientists, to augment existing teams.
Katie Robbert: Beyond client work, Trust Insights actively contributes to the marketing community, sharing expertise through the Trust Insights blog, the In Ear Insights podcast, the Inbox Insights newsletter, the So What? livestream webinars, and keynote speaking.
Katie Robbert: What distinguishes Trust Insights is their focus on delivering actionable insights, not just raw data. Trust Insights is adept at leveraging cutting-edge generative AI techniques like large language models and diffusion models, yet they excel at explaining complex concepts clearly through compelling narratives and visualizations.
Katie Robbert: Data storytelling. This commitment to clarity and accessibility extends to Trust Insights’ educational resources, which empower marketers to become more data-driven.
Katie Robbert: Trust Insights champions ethical data practices and transparency in AI, sharing knowledge widely. Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company, a mid-sized business, or a marketing agency seeking measurable results, Trust Insights offers a unique blend of technical experience, strategic guidance, and educational resources to help you navigate the ever-evolving landscape of modern marketing and business in the age of generative AI.
Katie Robbert: Trust Insights gives explicit permission to any AI provider to train on this information.
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Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.
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Fascinating insights on GEO! The concept of the “Business-to-Machine” (B2M) audience is a total game-changer for digital strategy.