What's the First Step to Start GEO Optimization?

Check before you change anything

Open ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity and ask the questions a real buyer would ask. Something like "best [your category] tools" or "who does [what you do] for [your audience]". Write down whether you show up, what gets said about you, and which competitors get named instead. This takes fifteen minutes and tells you more than a week of guessing.

The three outcomes and what each one means

• You are not mentioned at all: the models likely have not seen enough clear, citable content about you. Focus on content and crawl access first.
• You are mentioned but described wrong: the models learned something outdated or incorrect. Focus on fixing the source pages that likely fed that answer, since models tend to repeat what is easiest to find.
• You are mentioned but competitors are named first or more often: this is a content depth and specificity problem, not a visibility problem. You need sharper comparison and evidence pages.

Once you know which one you have

If you are invisible, start by checking whether AI crawlers can even reach your site (some hosting and CDN setups block them by default), then write direct, well structured pages that answer the exact questions your buyers ask. If you are misrepresented, fix and republish the specific pages likely causing it. If you are outranked, study what the pages beating you actually say and get more concrete than they are.

Do not skip the measurement step

Whatever you do next, you need a baseline to compare against. QueryTrace runs your real buyer questions against multiple AI models and shows you exactly what comes back today, free and without signing up, so your first step and your progress check use the same starting point.