A growing share of your future customers will never see a results page. They ask a question, an AI answers it, and three or four brands get named. Everybody else is invisible. In our own accounts, AI referrals are still a small slice of traffic, but it is the slice that converts best, because the visitor arrives already told that you are the answer.
This checklist is the exact list we run when we audit a site for AI search (people call it GEO, generative engine optimization, or AEO, answer engine optimization; same thing). It is in the order we do it, not the order it is usually written about. Technical access first, because nothing else matters if the crawlers cannot read you. Then entity clarity, then content shape, then off-site signals. Tick what is done, fix what is not, and come back in a quarter.
Enter your email and we send the PDF straight to your inbox, with a direct download link right here as well.
The PDF is on its way to your inbox. If it is not there in a few minutes, check the spam folder.
Download nowOne honest note up front: nobody controls which sources an AI cites. What you control is whether you are easy to find, easy to understand and easy to quote. That is what the 42 points below are about.
I run Maison Mint, a boutique marketing agency in Tallinn that manages Google and Meta ads, does SEO and GEO, and builds the tracking underneath it, for brands growing across the EU. Everything in this checklist comes from accounts we run, not from a course.
The resources on this site are free because the people who find them useful are exactly the people we like working with. No sales sequence, just the Wednesday newsletter, which you can leave with one click.
GEO (also called AEO, answer engine optimization) is the work of making a brand easy for AI systems to find, understand and quote, so it gets named in answers from ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. It overlaps with SEO but adds crawler access, entity clarity and quotable content structure.
No. AI systems draw heavily on the same signals Google does: crawlable pages, clear entities, authoritative mentions. The checklist adds the AI-specific layer on top: robots.txt for AI crawlers, llms.txt, schema with sameAs, quotable passages and a measurement routine.
About two hours for a typical small-business site if one person has access to the site, Search Console and the analytics account. Most fixes are small; the ones that take time are the off-site ones.
Yes, and section five of the checklist shows how: a monthly log of which brands the AI engines name for your ten core questions, a GA4 filter for AI referrals, and bot logs for crawler activity.
Yes. Our SEO and GEO service includes this audit, the ranked fix list and the implementation. Book a free 30 minutes at the contact page and bring your domain.
A one-evening, seven-page plan for a growing brand: goals, customer, channels, budget, 90-day calendar and KPIs
How to run Facebook and Instagram ads on 500 to 5,000 € a month without wasting half of it
B2B outreach that lands in the inbox, gets read and gets replies, GDPR included
All free resources live at mintagency.eu/resources. Ten free in-browser tools (ROAS calculator, UTM builder, SEO audit, ad copy generator and more) are on the blog.
Maison Mint runs Google and Meta ads, SEO and GEO, email and the tracking underneath for brands across the EU. The first 30 minutes are free and useful either way.