14 Days Journey to GEO – Day 4

Welcome to Day 4 of your Journey to GEO.

Quick recap:

Days 1, 2 and 3 have focused on showing you the shift that happened. In my blog post about Why I Created the GEO Academy, I show you how big this shift is and why I couldn’t stay and do nothing about it.

In Day 3 you could see that this whole thing changed because ChatGPT doing web searches to retrieve information was the ultimate game changer. Not being limited by training data is what made 2026 NOT feel the same at all like 2023 (when these LLMs started)

Maybe Microsoft was finally happy for having built BING. Most of the LLMs search using Bing and this can be seen in the retrieval they make. In most cases, they take from TOP 10 rankings on Bing, not TOP 10 on Google.

This is a foundational difference to traditional SEO, when only Google mattered. Google is trying to make it look like they’re still the big guys, but they’re not anymore, thanks to Perplexity and ChatGPT using Bing. Claude uses a different search engine. Lots of experts get this wrong, because they haven’t even tried on their own to study rankings versus citations. Ranking doesn’t guarantee citations (recommendations by ChatGPT), but it still matters for retrieval (where they get to pick the kind of sources they THEN analyze to see if something is recommendation worthy : eg. checking for fitness). My team, on the other hand, has been studying the search rankings a lot, and we even published blog posts to teach you about deviations from general keywords and how that works.

We’ll focus a lot on the parts about “how do you become fit enough that ChatGPT will trust you enough to recommend your brand?” … but we will also keep talking about rankings every now and then, because if you can’t be retrieved in the first place, there’s absolute ZERO chance the AIs will consider you. I mean, there is a reason why even the clients who got many ChatGPT and Perplexity results from us, still need us to do their SEO, too.

We’ve done a lot of work and I hope you take the time to read our findings and use them to supercharge your own business:

Fresh Content is more important than ever
Changing old content to new content and re-promoting it via social media profiles and email campaigns is also considered Fresh Content
Mix content for new keywords, with content designed to empower your entities
Social media is more important than ever for driving up entity strength
Social Media no longer requires “followers” to work for you. It brings drawbacks for brands who had thousands of followers, but give an unfair advantage to businesses who don’t have many followers. Especially local businesses
You’ve seen how the new search engines work with entities and why AI search doesn’t work without it.

The Entity article, once more.

Those changes are also vital for what we’ll be doing in AEO and GEO.

Without mixing those types of content, AEO and GEO does not work.

Now, for the rest of this Day in your journey, go to the GEO Academy and open up Lesson 2.

You can also login from here.

Lesson 2:

You will learn today how search works within ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude.

The question is no longer “does my website rank well?” The question is: has enough been written about me, by enough credible sources, in enough consistent ways, that an AI can always associate me with this space?

“in enough consistent ways” is exactly what almost all businesses today get very wrong.

We find many online visibility problems for your business that makes the AI engines NOT trust your business well enough to start recommending it.

We’ve been doing this a lot over these last few months for clients who asked us for it. Now, you can find this opt-in for the visibility audit directly on AISQ.com on the homepage (just before the footer starts)

My team even looks to see if all the credibility sources your brand has actually appear anywhere, if they are well connected and if they are kept fresh. Without these, it’s very hard to convice ChatGPT to recommend your brand.

Now, by the end of Lesson 2, you will also be asked to perform your very own audit. It will be a very different kind, but it will be a great self-assesment, to understand where your brand is today.

Please go and do it from within Lesson 2 in GEO Academy.