ChatGPT, Claude, and all AI chats quote the first paragraph
When OpenAI opened ChatGPT to the public in November 2022, search and answer interfaces began to change. ChatGPT tends to hand back one answer rather than a list of links, and the answer is often assembled from passages it has read elsewhere. Perplexity built much of its product around that move, and Google followed in 2024 by putting AI Overviews above its own results. In all three, the answer is made of borrowed sentences. We're convinced the borrowed sentence is the one that answered the question most plainly, and on a well-written page that sentence sits in the first paragraph. Everything below it was written for the human who stayed. The model came for the top.
So LLM SEO is a much smaller subject than the price of a GEO retainer suggests. The acronym came out of a 2023 research paper, and within months agencies had built dashboards, audits and webinars on top of it, the way they did for every acronym before it. We'd go easy on anyone who claims to know exactly how the models pick their sources. We haven't seen OpenAI, Perplexity or Google publish how they choose which passage to quote, and a GEO audit that claims to know is a guess with a logo on it. What follows is our opinion, and it covers one paragraph. Given one hour for LLM SEO, we'd spend all of it on that paragraph.
Put the buyer's question in the title
Back when keyword tools set the rules, they taught a generation of marketers to title posts like ransom notes. "GEO vs SEO 2025 ultimate guide best." Questions typed into ChatGPT read nothing like that, because people type them as whole sentences, lowercase and a little impatient, such as "what is the difference between GEO and SEO". So the title should carry that sentence close to how it was typed. We think the title is the loudest signal a page gives about what it answers, which is why a title that restates the question will do more for citation than a clever one ever did for clicks. If the cleverness has to live somewhere, give it the subtitle, where it can do no damage.
Answer it in the first two sentences
The first two sentences are the answer, with no runway. For the GEO question, we would write it this way.
GEO is the work of getting a page quoted inside the answers that ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews give. SEO is the older work of getting the same page ranked in Google's list of links, and the two overlap more than the people selling GEO would like.
That paragraph holds two sentences, three named products and one opinion, and a model can lift either sentence without the other falling apart. Names are what make it liftable. If the answer involves a tool, name the tool. If it involves a competitor, name the competitor, since "other platforms" gives a model nothing to match against a question about AirOps. And if the answer has a number in it, put the number in the second sentence with the month it was true, and only if it was true. A round number that dresses up a guess gets quoted too, which is worse than getting ignored. The paragraph that opened with three sentences about how fast everything is changing was written for a word count, and the model skipped it the way your readers did.
Give each post one question
When a post answers four questions, it hands the model four passages, each a quarter of an answer. The classic "everything you need to know about GEO" covered the definition, the history, the tools and the pricing, but none of its sections opened with a plain answer, since each one was busy handing off to the next. For a while it ranked, and in all that time nobody quoted it. A post about one question, by contrast, can spend its whole first paragraph on that question and its remaining nine hundred words on why. That leaves the other three questions over, which means three more posts. As problems go, that one beats a post nobody quotes.
Date your facts and say who stands behind them
When a model weighs two passages that say similar things, we'd bet on the one that says when it was true and who said it. "Propaganda costs $500 a month, billed monthly with no lock-in" is a sentence with an owner in it. Add the month and it becomes a claim a reader, or a model, can check against the calendar. "Pricing varies" has neither, and it reads like it was written by a committee that left early.
We'd write every number in a post with its date beside it and its source named in the sentence or linked on the words. Dated facts age, and that is the point of dating them. When the fact changes, the post that carried it has to change with it, and a stale number with a date on it at least admits its age.
Ask the models every week
Then check. Once a week, put the post's question to ChatGPT and to Perplexity in the words of the title, and write down whether the post was cited, which passage was quoted and who got cited instead. The answers drift from one run to the next, so a single check proves little and a month of them shows a direction. Perplexity lists its sources under each answer, which makes the bookkeeping painless. When the post loses, the page that won is the best editor's note you'll get, and it usually costs nothing to read.
When we planned our own blog, we picked ten searches to track on Google. For the AI answers, a spreadsheet and a calendar reminder did the job by hand, slower and with more coffee.
The post needs something of its own
All of this assumes the post has something to say that nobody else has said. A model quotes the clearest source it found, and a summary of other people's summaries is never the clearest source. It is the third photocopy. The pages that already rank for "GEO vs SEO" were mostly written by people who read the pages that ranked before them, and the model has read every one of them. Another rewrite of that pile gives it no reason to pick yours.
What gives it a reason is a number from your business, or the answer you give on sales calls when someone asks the question out loud. That answer was tested against people who could walk away, many times, long before anyone thought to write it down. Put it in the first two sentences the way you said it on the call. It is the one paragraph on the internet that only you can write.