Be retrievable before you try to be persuasive
Generative engines pull from live indexes and crawls. If your page is JavaScript-dependent, blocked to AI user agents, or buried four clicks deep, no amount of writing quality helps. Serve meaningful HTML on first response, allow the assistant crawlers you want traffic from, and keep important pages within two clicks of the homepage.
Write in self-contained chunks
Retrieval operates on passages, not documents. Each section should carry its own subject, its own definition of terms, and its own evidence. A chunk that depends on a paragraph 900 words earlier loses meaning the moment it is pulled out of context - and a chunk that loses meaning gets dropped from synthesis.
Give the model something only you have
Synthesis rewards novelty. Original benchmarks, first-party data, dated test results, and named case specifics survive summarization because they cannot be reconstructed from the other sources in the context window. Generic advice gets merged into the consensus paragraph with no citation.
Build corroboration off-site
Models weight claims that appear consistently across independent sources. Being described the same way on your site, on directory profiles, in reviews, and in third-party articles raises the confidence attached to statements about you - which is what a citation ultimately expresses.
Publish machine-readable context
Organization and Product schema, an llms.txt file, a clean sitemap, and stable canonical URLs make it cheap for a crawler to understand what you are. Cheap-to-parse sources get sampled more often.
Track citations, not positions
The GEO scoreboard is share of voice inside AI answers: how often your brand or domain is named for a defined prompt set, in what position, and with what sentiment. Run the same prompt set weekly so movement means something.