How to do generative engine optimization

Do the structural work yourself. Measure whether assistant referrers produced customers. Motif is the second half. A playbook that stops at 'get cited' is unfinished, because a citation is not a Stripe payment.

Two clocks, still

Live-retrieval citation can move in days after crawl. Training-corpus answers move when a vendor ships a model. This playbook is for live retrieval and the people who click. It will not promise a default-model mention next week.

What this playbook refuses

It will not tell you to scrape assistants for share of voice. It will not treat llms.txt as proven revenue. It will not restate the Princeton GEO paper (Aggarwal et al., 2024) as Motif cohort data. That paper measured visibility lifts from citations and statistics on a retrieval surface. Cite it as their work.

GEO playbook Motif will stand behind

  1. Write a 40-80 word direct answer Start each page that targets a question with a lead that a retrieval system can lift. Motif's catalog leads are that block. A vague intro wastes the first crawl.
  2. Mirror visible questions in FAQPage JSON-LD Make sure that the strings in the schema match the headings that people see. Hidden FAQ markup is a lie to the crawler and to the model.
  3. Split crawler policy by class Make one decision for search-index bots and user-requested fetchers. Make a different decision for model-related crawlers. If you want to block corpus collection, do not set Disallow: / for a search-index token.
  4. Keep first touch on the landing Use lowercase UTMs. Do not put tags after #. Do not let chatgpt.com collapse into last-click Direct. Motif stores the assistant host on arrival. GA4's last-click attribution can still give payment credit to Direct or brand search.
  5. Join Stripe, not screenshots A citation screenshot is not evidence. Motif waits for the person, then the payment, cohort-correct to the arrival window.
  6. Accept silence If the week cannot support a move, Motif returns no recommendation. Shipping a spend change on vibes is the failure mode this playbook exists to prevent.

How to do generative engine optimization, step by step?

Add a short direct-answer lead. Copy those questions into FAQPage schema. Allow the search-index crawlers you want citations from. Store assistant first touch. Join Stripe. Do not spend on a quiet week. Motif does the measurement half.

Do I need a GEO tool?

You can do structure without buying anything. You cannot, at the end of a week, honestly rank which assistant sent customers unless first touch and Stripe are joined. That join is Motif. Visibility-only scanners stop earlier.

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