Issue 1 - We're sooo Early to GEO

Hey there, rankiacs — welcome to the inaugural issue of AI Ranker Weekly.

If youre reading this in June of 2025, you are probably one of the first people in the world to be thinking about this topic. But one thing is for sure, you won't be the last.

AI-driven search is coming fast — and it’s not just some gimmick bolted onto Google. It’s a complete rethinking of how people discover content, products, and brands. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini are already changing how people get answers.

And the data is clear:

In multiple client analytics dashboards that I’ve looked at, ChatGPT is already showing up as 10% of all referral traffic.

No links. No tags. Just untraceable traffic from AI answers.

So here’s the million-dollar question:

If this seems like common sense to you — trust me, you’re early.

Your competitors? Most of them aren’t even thinking about AI yet, let alone optimizing for it.

Just asking this question puts you ahead of 99% of your market.

Yes, you’re a 1%er… but not for long.

Just like SEO became a baseline skill once Google took over the web, GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is poised to become the next must-have strategy.

This newsletter is here to help you, as a marketer, or business owner, or anyone looking to rank higher in AI. We’re going to to give you the latest news, links, articles, tools, and techniques from around the web. So let’s get started.

📥 GEO Links of the Week

Here’s what’s shaping the world of Generative Engine Optimization right now:

• 🔗 a16z: How Generative Engine Optimization Rewrites the Rules of Search

  • Andreessen Horowitz is one of the leading VC tech firms, so when they say a trend is coming, you’d be fool not to listen

  • The authors lay out the case for the trend of AI search replacing Google, backing up their claims with a lot of data

  • They list around 20 tools that are working on tracking (like Peec, AthenaHQ, algomizer, and others)

• 🔗 Alts.co: GEO is the New SEO — Here’s What That Means

  • High-level but practical.

  • Makes the case that GEO is not only real, but imminent — and why early adopters (like you) are in the best position to benefit.

  • More personal - written by the founder of alts.co 

• 🔗 Ignorance.ai: SEO for AI — A Look at GEO

  • Technical and Practical

  • Breaks down how AI tools actually pull responses — from training data, fresh content, and retrieval plugins — and what content formats increase your chances of being cited.

  • GEO = Be the Answer, Not Just the Link
    Instead of keyword-stuffing or ranking for SERPs, the new goal is reference. That means providing clear, authoritative, answer-style content (e.g., FAQs, expert quotes, schemas) that AI finds and cites during generation.

  • Early Movers Can Leapfrog Giants

  • Reputation and Context Matter More Than Ever
    AI doesn’t just read your site — it pulls from Reddit, Quora, review blogs, directories, etc. A random upvoted comment mentioning your brand might weigh more than your own homepage. Your reputation across the web now shapes how (or if) AI sees you.

• 🔗 HubSpot: Boost AI Search Visibility with Generative Engine Optimization

  • Mainstream coverage with tactical suggestions.

  • HubSpot enters the chat, offering a beginner-friendly take with tips on content structure, metadata, and tools to get started.

  • Lots of practical suggestions and (mostly SEO-based) techniques to help get ranked

• 🔗 WSJ: Google’s New AI Tools Are Crushing News Sites

  • This is more about how Google’s AI instant answers are hurting click through rates, and traffic on publishers

  • Publishers are seeing traffic drops as high as 40% from queries now answered directly by AI Overviews.

  • Even high-authority content gets bypassed — the AI summary often satisfies intent without a single click.

  • This isn’t just a news problem — eCommerce, health, and how-to content are next in the AI firing line

• Nogood: GEO strategies to boost Ai Search Visibility

  • GEO = content built to be referenced, not just ranked

  • Focus on clear, authoritative blocks: FAQs, expert quotes, structured summaries

  • SEO still matters — but so does formatting for LLM “liftability”

  • Structured data, schema, and strong E-E-A-T are your foundation

  • “Be the answer, not just the link”

Prompt:

I’d like you to act as an AI brand perception analyst. My goal is to understand how my brand is represented across various AI-generated responses, so I can identify gaps, optimize visibility, and improve the likelihood of citation in future AI-driven search results.

Here’s what I need you to do:

Summarize how my brand is described across the web and AI-accessible sources. Include tone, positioning, typical keywords or phrases used, and any standout value props.

1. List what types of questions or prompts currently surface my brand in AI-generated answers. Be specific — include exact phrasing or trigger patterns if possible.

2. Compare how my brand is positioned relative to 2–3 key competitors. Where do they get cited instead of me? What do they seem to be doing differently in terms of content structure or authority signals?

3. Identify which content or pages (URLs) from my site are most likely being used or cited. Distinguish between training-data references and live web retrieval.

4. Analyze my third-party presence: Where is my brand mentioned positively or negatively across forums, review sites, Quora, Reddit, or articles that AI tools might ingest or quote?

5. Based on this, give me tactical advice on what to fix, what to expand, and how to improve my “reference rate” in AI responses.

My brand is: [Insert brand name here]
My website is: [Insert brand URL here]
My main competitors are: [Insert 2–3 competitors]

Please format your response with headers for each section, and include direct quotes, paraphrases, or AI response screenshots if relevant. Feel free to simulate typical queries or perform live lookups if available

🪖 GEO in the Trenches

Here is my report of using two GEO tools - AthenaHQ, and AI SEO Tracker.

I really wanted to try out Peec AI, but when I signed up it just showed me a page that said closed beta, and book a demo call - ugh.

With Athena, the flow is really easy, you punch in your website URL, and click generate, and Athena will show a report on Overall GEO Score, Brand Mentions, AI Search Share of Voice, Underperforming Prompt, which are all pretty useful. Sadly, my brand scored a solid 0 on everything, probably because I never work on any kind of SEO or GEO for my own site.

I got a few suggestions for prompts that people would use to find my service. This is super helpful, because it gives me real examples of things that people are searching for, and it gives me a starting point of what to optimize for.

Then, I was immediately paywalled to the tune of $200/mo+. This could be a good price, not sure yet.

The other tool I tried was called Aiseotracker.com

The way this tool works is that you type a query into the box, and the platform runs queries on all major AI chats, and then collects brand mentions, and ranks them. Predictably, my brand did not show up, but when I tried some queries related to my clients’ stores, I was able to find them in the rankings, which is an encouraging start.

I think the key is to find out which queries to optimize for, or even to create extra pages on a site for, so AI can find them easier and therefore recommend them.

I recommend signing up for aiseotracker.com - it’s free to play with for now, and it’s fun to play with. I am not being paid to promote it.

That’s all for this week.

Oh wait, for making it this far, you deserve a meme.

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

I’m still learning a ton, so I welcome any and all feedback, and comments. If there is anything you would like to see more of, please reply and let me know.