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This week’s guest is Jason Patel, CEO and founder of OpenForge AI, one of the first platforms built to give companies visibility inside generative engines and AI assistants. Jason sits at the front line of GEO - Generative Engine Optimization - the emerging discipline of making your brand legible to LLMs, not just humans. If SEO helped you get found in 10 blue links, GEO helps you get remembered as one of a few AI-recommended answers.
Inside this episode:
Why GEO is a behavior shift, not a new buzzword - the buyer no longer starts with a browser, they start with a chatbot.
How LLMs actually “see” your brand through entities and knowledge graphs, and why structured data is now table stakes.
The three-legged GEO stool: commercial content, third-party citations, and schema as the new technical moat.
Recall as the new visibility metric - moving from static rankings to probabilistic “How often are we the answer?”
Why GEO is an early land grab where smaller players can outrun incumbents in AI results.
Renting vs owning AI traffic - and how to turn ChatGPT-sourced visitors into a durable content ecosystem.
What a Head of GEO looks like in 2026 and why it’s a 1-2 person, AI-amplified function.
How agentic search changes procurement, pricing, and competitive intelligence when machines are your first audience.
This episode is for founders, CMOs, RevOps and GTM teams who know their buyers already use ChatGPT and Perplexity – and don’t want to wake up invisible in AI search.
Highlights
GEO is UX, not hype.
Search is moving from “scan 10 blue links” to “ask one question, get one answer.” GEO is about being that answer - in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, AI Overviews and agentic systems.
LLMs think in entities and graphs.
Models place your brand as an entity on a knowledge graph and connect you to topics, products and competitors. If you don’t feed that graph, you don’t exist when the buyer asks.
Recall beats rank.
AI answers are probabilistic. You don’t “hold position 3” - you get selected more or less often. Visibility becomes: How frequently are we seen, cited and clicked when our ICP asks a question?
Three-legged GEO stool.
Commercial & transactional content for in-market buyers
Relevant third-party citations (roundups, reviews, category pages)
Structured data and schema that make your site machine readable.
Economics flip in your favor.
If you GEO-optimize before incumbents, you can show up next to - or instead of - much larger competitors in AI answers and capture high-intent demand at lower acquisition cost.
Attribution breaks, trust compounds.
You often won’t see the full query journey. But when ChatGPT recommends you, buyers arrive pre-primed to trust you, so conversion and LTV matter more than raw traffic.
Clarity is now infrastructure.
Agents and models reward brands that are brutally clear about ICP, pricing, value props and competitive positioning. Messy sites lose - even if they’re big.
Frameworks and Playbooks from the Episode
1. The GEO Visibility Stool
Goal: Show up consistently in AI answers for in-market queries.
Commercial & transactional intent
Prioritize content where buyers are close to purchase: pricing pages, comparison pages, “X vs Y,” implementation FAQs, ROI breakdowns.
Avoid overly broad “What is…?” posts that get summarized without citation.
Third-party citations
Treat “relevant mentions + links” as the new authority layer.
Target: industry roundups, “top tools” lists, analyst blogs, category pages, G2/Capterra, niche newsletters and YouTube reviews in your space.
Structured data & schema
Implement schema on product, pricing, FAQ and content pages.
Make pages scriptable: clearly label products, FAQs, images, pricing tables, comparison charts so LLMs can lift clean snippets.
2. Machine-Readable Brand Blueprint
Objective: Turn your site from pretty brochure into structured input for models and agents.
Break paragraphs into ≤4 sentences, use bullet points heavily.
Write semantic H2s as natural questions or statements (“Who GTM Vault is for,” “Pricing for growth-stage teams”).
Start each section with a liftable answer sentence the model can drop straight into an AI response.
Keep navigation simple: clear ICP statement, value prop, pricing, proof, and “how it works.”
Ensure HTML is clean and crawlable - no crucial information trapped only in images or heavy JS.
3. Rent vs Own: AI Traffic Conversion Loop
Rent (AI engines)
ChatGPT / Perplexity / AI Overviews surface your brand based on GEO.
Visitor lands on a high-intent page (pricing, comparison, use case).
Own (your ecosystem)
Offer a clear next step: newsletter, masterclass, sandbox, demo - not just “Contact us.”
Use email, YouTube and deep content to build trust over time.
Accept that the upstream query path is a black box - collect “How did you find us?” and rebuild the story from the customer’s words.
4. GEO Readiness Ladder
Use this to decide when GEO belongs in your GTM plan.
Pre-fit: Founders chasing PMF. Focus on product and direct sales, not GEO yet.
Early traction (≈$1–3M ARR): Marketing leadership comes in, inbound matters, customers already use AI assistants. Start GEO.
Scale stage: Dedicated Head of GEO (1–2 people) plus a junior resource for outreach and citations, amplified by AI tooling.
Agentic future: GEO expands to AEO - Agentic Engine Optimization - where your structure, pricing and policies are designed for autonomous agents as buyers.
Referenced Concepts
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), entities and knowledge graphs, commercial vs transactional intent, structured data/schema, third-party citations, land-grab dynamics in AI search, rented vs owned audiences, agentic engine optimization (AEO), machine-readable brands, brand mentions as authority, GEO-native measurement.
Recommended Starting Move
Set up Google Search Console if you haven’t already. If Google can’t crawl and index you properly, AI systems almost certainly can’t either. Fix crawl issues first, then layer on GEO.
Takeaways for your revenue engine
Treat GEO as an evolution, not a reset. The SEO fundamentals still matter - but the goal shifts from ranking pages to appearing in AI conversations that matter.
Optimize for in-market intent. Invest the majority of content budget in commercial, comparative and implementation topics that line up with how people actually buy.
Make your site machine-friendly. Schema, clear headings, short paragraphs and liftable snippets are the new technical moat.
Earn authority through relevance. Third-party citations from real category nodes beat generic backlinks. Prioritize depth in your niche.
Measure revenue, not pageviews. Focus on conversions, deal quality and time-to-value from AI-sourced visitors instead of chasing raw traffic.
Design for agents and humans. Clarity on ICP, value prop and pricing isn’t just good UX - it’s how future agents decide who to recommend.
We discuss
0:20 What GEO actually is
2:21 How LLMs see and interpret brands
4:34 Why chat replaces traditional search behavior
6:22 The GEO visibility system: content, citations, schema
10:11 What AI engines are indexing today
11:28 How GEO changes distribution and attribution
19:10 Where teams should start with generative visibility
25:04 From SEO to AEO and the rise of agentic search
29:57 The GEO metrics that actually matter
What you should do this week
Audit your high-intent pages. Pricing, comparison, “Who we serve” and implementation pages - are they structured, scannable and schema-tagged?
Map 10 commercial/transactional queries your ICP might ask in ChatGPT and check whether you appear in responses today.
List 10 third-party properties (roundups, review sites, newsletters, YouTube channels) where your product should be mentioned - and start outreach.
Add a simple “How did you find us?” question to your demo form or onboarding flow and track explicit mentions of AI assistants.
Why this matters for scaling
Search is being rebuilt around representation, not rankings. In an AI-led world, the companies that win won’t be those with the biggest content farm - they’ll be the ones whose brands are easiest for models and agents to understand, trust and reuse.
GEO is how you make sure your product shows up when it matters most: at the exact moment an AI assistant is asked, “What should I buy?”
Predictable growth in the next decade will come from owning your place in AI answers, not just fighting for position in browser results.
That is the GTM Vault advantage.
Connect
Follow Jason Patel: LinkedIn // OpenForge AI
Follow Rick Koleta: LinkedIn // RiteGTM
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