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 the retrieval surface 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
- Write a 40-80 word direct answer Open every page that targets a question with a lead a retrieval system can lift. Motif's catalog leads are that block. Vague intros waste the first crawl.
- Mirror visible questions in FAQPage JSON-LD The strings in schema must match the headings people see. Hidden FAQ markup is a lie to the crawler and to the model.
- Split crawler policy by class Search-index bots and user-requested fetchers sit on a different decision from model-related crawlers. Do not Disallow: / a search-index token because you meant to block corpus collection.
- Keep first touch on the landing Lowercase UTMs, no tags after #, and do not let chatgpt.com collapse into last-click Direct. Motif stores the assistant host on arrival. GA4's last-click attribution can still hand payment credit to Direct or brand search.
- Join Stripe, not screenshots A citation screenshot is not evidence. Motif waits for the person, then the payment, cohort-correct to the arrival window.
- 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?
Ship a short direct-answer lead, mirror those questions in FAQPage schema, allow the search-index crawlers you want citations from, store assistant first touch, join Stripe, and 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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