The 90-Day GEO Adaptation Plan for Content Teams

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of structuring content so AI models can understand and reference it: citing it in responses, surfacing it in AI Overviews, and referencing it when users ask specific questions. That means providing clear, high-signal answers written the way LLMs parse information, a clean schema that gives models structure to crawl, predictable content that models can ingest quickly, and structured depth that increases an LLM's confidence and accuracy.

For content marketers, this translates into rethinking technical foundations, content asset mix, and how success is measured. Traffic alone no longer tells the whole story of organic success. Engagement metrics like scrolled users and engaged sessions now matter more for understanding performance compared to clicks or page visits.

This guide is a 90-day action plan for adapting your content strategy to GEO. It moves through three phases: technical SEO and UX fixes, content freshness and measurement, then backlinks, brand sentiment, and EEAT signals.

A quick note: many of these best practices overlap with traditional SEO, but emphasis has shifted. Let's get started.

The first 30 days of GEO Adaptation

The first 30 days of GEO adaptation focus on actioning backlog items: the technical initiatives, UX projects, and content assets that have been deferred but now directly impact whether LLMs can crawl, parse, and cite your content.

Research from Princeton University shows that GEO optimization can boost visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40%, but only if the technical and content foundation is solid.

The first 30 days address the areas where teams can no longer hit the snooze button: technical SEO cleanup, site rendering, page speed, and UX improvements. Start with technical SEO. It remains the foundation for both traditional search rankings and generative engine citations.

Technical SEO is critical

Fix crawl errors and technical debt

Sites with minimal technical errors are easier to crawl and more likely to be surfaced in search. If you’re an SEO, this might already sound familiar. Crawlability is just as important for LLMs as it is for traditional SEO (if not more). Reducing 3XXs, 4XXs, mismatched canonicals, and redirect chains are critical. Address these in the first 30 days. But GEO requires looking beyond these standard fixes.

Prioritize server-side rendering

LLMs place emphasis on rendering. Sites that are client-side rendered do not perform as well in AI search as sites that are server-side rendered. Server-side rendering delivers fully formed HTML to crawlers immediately, while client-side rendering requires JavaScript to execute in the browser before content becomes visible. 

LLMs rely on reading complete HTML to parse and contextualize information effectively. Sites heavily reliant on JavaScript will likely give LLMs a hard time crawling, while server-side rendering delivers fully rendered HTML directly in the initial server response, making your content as accessible as it can be.

Google's crawlers can handle client-side rendered sites, though it takes longer and requires more resources. If your site renders client-side and won't load with JavaScript disabled, LLMs will struggle to access your content. This makes it significantly more challenging to get citations and grow traffic from this channel.

Test how your site renders by disabling JavaScript in your browser. If the page goes blank or loses critical content, you have a rendering problem that needs addressing in the first 30 days.

Improve site speed

Site speed remains a critical technical element for SEO and GEO visibility. Load speed, layout stability, and mobile responsiveness impact both user experience and crawl efficiency, which affects whether LLMs can access your content effectively. 

Many generative engines use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), fetching only the top 5 sources from search engines for each query due to context length limitations. Speed of response is critical with conversational AI search, and LLMs will only reference the top results within their database to analyze and incorporate into responses.

The connection between traditional search rankings and LLM visibility is complex. Strong traditional search rankings can increase your chances of being cited, particularly for retrieval-based systems like Perplexity. However, recent analysis of 18,377 queries found that ChatGPT and Gemini rely more on pre-trained knowledge and selective retrieval, with low URL-level matches to Google rankings.

Site speed improvements serve dual purposes: they help you maintain competitive traditional search rankings that feed into some LLM retrieval systems, and they ensure crawlers can efficiently access and process your content when LLMs do retrieve it.

User Experience (UX) needs to exceed expectations 

With traffic reduced by AI Overviews, every visitor that lands on your site is more valuable than before. When users do click through from AI search results, they arrive with higher intent but shorter attention spans. Sites that make it friction-free to move from discovery to demo will convert these high-intent visitors while competitors lose them to poor navigation or cluttered interfaces.

Strong UX now serves a dual purpose: it keeps users engaged long enough to convert, and it signals to search engines and LLMs that your content satisfies user intent. Engagement metrics like time on page, scroll depth, and conversion actions feed back into how both traditional search and AI systems evaluate content quality.

The fundamentals haven't changed—top navigation, CTA placement, resource categorization, and on-page copy must work together to help users quickly contextualize information and move to the next step. What's changed is the margin for error. Attention spans are short and patience is not in abundant supply. 

Start by auditing your demo or trial page. Count the form fields—every additional field can reduce completion rates. Does the page surface compelling ROI metrics or statistics that reinforce why the user came? Is there social proof showing that recognizable brands in their industry have succeeded with your product? If the answer to any of these is no, prioritize fixing it in the first 30 days. These high-intent visitors are too valuable to lose to a poorly optimized conversion page.

Gap analysis and content asset types need to be evaluated differently

Before the Helpful Content algorithm updates, ranking high for Top of Funnel (TOFU) content could significantly improve your traffic and visibility in search. The paradigm has changed. TOFU content is now more of an awareness play than a traffic play. It still matters and needs attention, but not in the same ways as before.

Why TOFU still matters:

• TOFU content builds awareness that feeds lower-funnel recognition
• It remains critical for AI Mode and AI Overviews (though not as much for LLM citations)
• LLMs often answer general queries from their training data without running searches—meaning no citations, no visibility
• Precision and relevancy matter more than ever for this content

In the first 30 days, review your TOFU topic coverage to identify gaps that could hurt your visibility in AI Overviews and traditional search.

MOFU/BOFU content is now mission-critical:

Middle and bottom-of-funnel content has become even more important in the GEO era. While TOFU is categorically broad, MOFU/BOFU is sticky and specific to your brand and product. When users ask LLMs product-specific questions, these assets often get surfaced in responses.

Priority asset types:

• Case studies showing real customer outcomes
• Industry-specific guides and frameworks
• Thought leadership addressing specific pain points
• Detailed reports with original data
• Core product and solution pages

Build a comprehensive library covering:

• Industries you serve
• The products you have
• Ideal Customer Personas (ICPs)
• Jobs to be Done (JTBD)
• Specific pain points and solutions

This foundation is critical for both capturing and maintaining LLM visibility when high-intent buyers are researching solutions.

Days 31-60 of GEO adaptation 

After the first month of GEO preparations, the site should have strong technical health, improved UX and navigation, and an action plan to address content gaps. Technical updates can be challenging to implement, but they often yield quick wins in increased visibility. UX improvements will require cross-comparing metrics like engaged sessions, scrolled users, engagement rate, and conversions. These are the subtle changes that bring not-so-subtle results. 

Gap analyses as a process are quick, but the pruning and creation process that follows requires significant time. Creating content to address gaps in the lower funnel will take time, but it will drive value and continue to lift visibility. This activity can absolutely run in parallel to initiatives that fall into days 31-90. 

LLMs favor fresh content

Many GEO best practices follow SEO best practices. One of these is content freshness. Research testing seven major LLMs found that "fresh" passages are consistently promoted, with models shifting rankings by up to 95 positions and reversing preferences between equally relevant content by up to 25% based solely on recency. Analysis of 17 million citations across AI platforms shows that AI assistants prefer citing content that is 25.7% fresher than traditional search results, with cited URLs averaging 2.9 years old compared to 3.9 years for organic search.

What does this mean? Balancing content efforts across new and existing content is more important than ever for maintaining coverage. Overinvesting in TOFU can slow visibility in the decision-making stages of the user journey. Inversely, overinvesting in MOFU/BOFU content can create significant gaps in awareness. Balancing the asset types your content team produces—both new and refreshed content—is the key to success.

Measurement matters, but we need to focus on different metrics

Examining holistic performance can skew reality and obscure success in the GEO era. Before AIOs, AI Mode, and LLMs, success signals looked a lot different. Impressions and traffic were the KPIs that led the charge. With traffic greatly reduced and the numbers parameter depreciated, engagement-based metrics have moved up in importance. 

Key metrics to track

• Engaged sessions: These indicate that a user spent more than 10 seconds on a page, viewed two or more pages, and completed a key event. Increased engaged sessions show that a site is compelling, meeting user intent, and encouraging conversion actions.
• Engagement rate: The number of engaged sessions divided by total sessions. This reflects how often users meaningfully engage with your content.
• Average time on page: Instead of bounce rate (also somewhat antiquated), this metric reveals whether users stay to read the content or move to another page.
• Scrolled users: The default setting shows how often users scroll through 90% of the page. Higher scroll depth means users kept finding value as they moved through the full page.
• New users: This indicates that your site is reaching beyond converted users. Increases in new users signal strength in topical coverage, while declines may reveal gaps.

Site section-level tracking is equally important for GEO success

GEO changes how traffic is dispersed to each site section. It only makes sense that we need to examine isolated subfolders when evaluating the success of content initiatives. A core page naturally won't see the same volume of high-intent users as a blog, so why measure these grouped together?

Instead of a holistic measurement, measure by site section. Break out dashboards into sections that filter for core pages, blogs, competitor comparison, and case studies. This could realistically expand if you want to break up resources or core page types into their own sections. 

The final result should be a dashboard that allows you to look at each subfolder or asset type against the metrics mentioned in the section above. This view can paint a much clearer picture of where the site is winning and where more efforts need to be invested.

Example site section tracking:

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Days 61-90 of your GEO adaptation plan 

The final stretch of GEO preparations lives partially off-page. This final phase is mostly focused on backlinks, owned media, and earned media. 

Off-page signals feed LLMs information about customer sentiment 

Traditional search leaned into backlinks as a barometer of credibility. The more backlinks you earned, the better your potential to rank. It was an A-to-B system—and it was flawed.

LLMs also consider backlinks, but precision outweighs volume. Research analyzing over 21,000 domains found that Domain Authority correlates at only r=0.10-0.21 with LLM visibility, meaning sites with lower authority scores can outrank higher-authority sites if content better matches user intent. LLMs prioritize relevant backlinks from credible, topically related sources over sheer link count.

Backlinks from random, unrelated sites don't help you win. Should these links be disavowed? Not necessarily. Google has stated that disavowing low-quality links is no longer necessary for most sites—their algorithms are now sophisticated enough to identify and ignore spammy links without manual intervention.

Brand mentions are the new backlinks

Beyond traditional backlinks, brand mentions across user-generated content platforms have become critical signals for LLM visibility:

• UGC content like Reddit has a 62.38% chance of being cited when appearing in Google's top 10 results
• UGC platforms make up 21.74% of all AI-generated citations
• Research analyzing 118,000 B2B SaaS citations found that Reddit and G2 dominate the LLM citation landscape

Join the conversation, don't just monitor it

It's not always possible to control what people say about a brand online, but it's possible to join the conversation. User Generated Content sites like Reddit, review sites, and forums offer spaces where users openly share experiences and perspectives.

How to engage effectively:

• Positive sentiment: Amplify authentic experiences on owned channels
• Negative sentiment: Respond in-platform to acknowledge friction and foster connections
• Consistent engagement: Set up a system of timely replies to off-page mentions

This approach shows LLMs how the brand supports users and builds the authentic presence these systems prioritize when determining citations.

EEAT is critical for owning your lane 

EEAT principles (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) aren't just Google's quality framework anymore. They also influence how AI systems decide whose content to surface. AI Overviews and LLM-generated answers prioritize brands that own their knowledge graph, are widely referenced, and are recognized leaders in their industry. Content backed by reliable sources, citations, and transparent authorship is more likely to appear in AI-generated search features. The clearer your trust signals, the more likely your content gets cited.

Important EEAT signals to review 

• Author pages with avatars: Every published piece should have a relevant author with a photo. Select authors based on their expertise (both in-house and across the web) and provide a bio page that backs up their credibility. If the site still has content written by team members who have moved on, or content missing authors altogether, it's time to update.
• Publish date: LLMs favor fresh content. Users seeking SaaS solutions also understand that older content might not accurately reflect the product today. Include a visible publish date with every piece of resource content.
• Reviewed by: This extra line of copy communicates to users and crawlers that multiple experts were involved in creating the piece. Nice to have in most cases, but important to consider if the brand operates in a crowded or competitive vertical.
• Cited sources for statistics: All statistics need to be cited and linked back to the original source. This applies even when the original source is another article on the site.
• Industry awards: Gartner, Forrester, Inc., and other industry awards are visible off-page, but should be presented on-page too. These add to trust and authority signals.
• Certifications: SOC-2, HIPAA, GDPR, and others are not "nice to have." For highly-regulated industries, these are requirements for working together. If your organization has these certifications, display them on the site.
• About page: This might be the most critical EEAT item for LLM visibility. LLMs look at About pages to help contextualize what a brand has to offer. Make sure this page is robust and clearly highlights what you want to communicate about your brand.

Beyond the first 90 days of GEO adaptation

The first 90 days of GEO adaptation set the foundation. Technical health makes your content accessible to LLMs. Content depth and freshness keep you visible as models update their training data. Off-page signals and EEAT reinforce the credibility that gets you cited over competitors.

These elements compound. A fast, well-structured site means nothing if the content is thin. Strong content underperforms if LLMs can't crawl it. The work is interconnected, and it doesn't stop at day 90. GEO is an ongoing practice, not a one-time project.

If your team needs help prioritizing these updates or building a roadmap for GEO visibility, Ten Speed can help.