These notes started with an hour-long GEO video I watched in December and mostly believed. Belief is cheap, so since then I've been running its claims against my own site, one change at a time: make the change, then watch Bing Webmaster Tools and three saved queries I re-ask ChatGPT and Perplexity every month. Dated updates at the bottom; I rewrite sections when reality disagrees with them.
SEO grew a layer
Everyone opens with the same stat: roughly 80% of searches still run through the classic Google box. That's a borrowed number and I haven't verified it. What I can verify is my own analytics, since December, AI referrals to hi-daniel.com are a rounding error next to organic Google. Single visits on days organic brings dozens. Everything below assumes the page can already rank, because a page that can't rank doesn't get cited either.
The Bing dependency nobody prices in
ChatGPT's real-time browsing runs through Bing, mostly; ChatGPT hedges about post-GPT-4 behavior when you ask it. Either way, a site that never bothered with Bing has excluded itself from ChatGPT.
This claim was cheap to test, so I tested it. December 12: registered hi-daniel.com in Bing Webmaster Tools and submitted the sitemap. Four minutes against the advertised five. Within a week the crawl report showed Bingbot visiting daily and 30-odd pages indexed, pages Bing had no reason to know about before. Has a ChatGPT answer cited me since? No. Not on any of the three queries I track (“how to reconcile marketing attribution across ad platforms,” “best way to automate a weekly marketing report,” “what is GEO in SEO”). But in December those queries couldn't have surfaced me.
Write for extraction
Every GEO post tells you AI reads for structure: question-shaped H2s, answer in the first sentence, tables for anything comparative. Fine, here's my one data point. In January I re-opened my Monday-report post, which began with two paragraphs of scene-setting before saying what the system does. I moved a one-sentence answer to the top and pushed the story underneath. That sentence says the reporting system I built reconciles nine data sources into one Monday number, automatically.
Then the cheapest extraction test I know: paste the page into ChatGPT and ask what it says. Before the edit, the summary led with my throat-clearing. After, it led with the sentence I want quoted. I can't claim a citation yet, but it's the same extraction step, and I watched it happen. An opener like “This depends on several factors…” fails this test every time; the extractor moves on to a page that doesn't defer. Answer first, qualify after. The prose can still be good. It just can't carry the fact. One post is the whole sample here; I have not run the paste test on anything else since January.
The robots.txt check, in one paragraph
Confirm robots.txt isn't blocking GPTBot, Bingbot, or Googlebot. Block a crawler by accident and you vanish from AI answers, silently. I ran this on both my domains and wrote it up properly, missing subdomain file and all, in a separate post on the Ahrefs data. I checked 2 domains: 0 accidental blocks, 1 subdomain with no robots.txt. Two curl commands.
Machine-verifiable identity
The claim: AI systems cross-check who you are across public sources, and matching answers earn trust. I can't see inside anyone's credibility model, so file this section under plausible, partially tested. What I could test was my own record. In February I pulled up every public description of me I could find. LinkedIn, this site, an old agency directory, a 2023 conference bio. Four sources; two had drifted. The directory still called me a PPC specialist, circa 2019. The conference bio named a company I'd left. I got three of the four up to date; the directory ignores edit requests, so control your own record early.
The honest limit: I'm not in Wikidata or Crunchbase, and I'm not notable enough to force my way in. Parts of this checklist only work for companies. For a company, treat LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, Crunchbase, and Wikidata as one record with four views, and reconcile it quarterly.
Third-party mentions are the citation currency
When a model answers a category question (best X for Y), it reads public ranking pages and splits the credit. This one is easy to observe yourself: I asked Perplexity for the best competitor ad intelligence tools and expanded the citations. Of the eight tools it named, seven traced back to the same two roundup posts.
Your own page only files a claim. Find the roundups your category's questions resolve to then get listed on them. Mine are two posts on the outreach list, neither pitched yet, and I can check both next month.
The version I pasted in Slack
What I sent a content team I was advising in March, verbatim minus the emoji:
- robots.txt: confirm GPTBot, Bingbot, Googlebot aren't blocked. Subdomains too. Today.
- Bing Webmaster Tools: register the site, submit the sitemap. Four minutes. Before lunch.
- Every money page: question-shaped H2, answer in the first sentence. Test it, paste the page into ChatGPT, ask “what's the point of this page.” If the summary leads with your setup instead of your answer, rewrite the top.
- Pricing and comparisons go in real HTML tables.
- Ask Perplexity your five biggest category questions. Note which listicles it cites. That's the outreach list, send it to whoever owns PR.
- Profiles (LinkedIn, GBP, Crunchbase, Wikidata if you qualify): one record, four views. Reconcile quarterly, calendar it.
What came back: they ran the robots.txt check and registered with Bing. The rest of the list is still sitting where I left it.
GEO comes down to making your presence understandable, referenceable, and prominent enough that a model reaches for it.
The log
Dec 2025. First version, straight from the video plus the first tests: registered with Bing, checked robots.txt on both domains, the three tracked queries saved.
Jan 2026. Reformatted the Monday-report post answer-first; added the paste-it-into-ChatGPT test to the checklist after it caught the problem the rewrite fixed.
Mar 2026. Split the robots.txt audit and the Ahrefs correlation data into their own post. Rewrote the identity section after reconciling my own profiles (3 of 4 current). Citation scoreboard: ChatGPT 0 for 3 on the tracked queries; Perplexity cited this site once, on the weekly-report question. Small number. Real one, though. Next check: June.