How do you make your marketing content show up when people ask AI instead of Googling?
Gartner predicts a 25% drop in traditional search by the end of 2026. People are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude their questions instead of typing into Google. If your content isn’t in the AI training data or retrieval set, you don’t exist to these platforms.
This video breaks down Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — the AI version of SEO — and gives you five actionable ways to make your content citable by machines, not just findable by humans.
What you’ll learn:
Why YouTube is now more cited by AI than Reddit
The five things AI looks for when deciding what to cite
How FAQ formats, TL;DRs, and clear structure help AI find your answers
Why EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) still matters
How to check if your content is being cited by AI right now
Your action item:
Audit your top 10 pages. When were they last updated? If it’s been over two years, it’s time for a refresh.
Tools mentioned: Answer the Public, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Goodie AI, Profound, Rankscale.ai
00:00 GEO: Making Content AI-Citable and Discoverable
01:47 Why does being cited by AI matter?
02:16 What is Generative Engine Optimization or GEO?
03:18 What are 5 things that AI looks for in your content?
03:26 1. Structure over style to get cited by AI platforms
04:50 2. Answer the question directly so AI cites your content
05:49 3. Demonstrate expertise in your content to get cited by AI
07:38 4. Transcripts and accessibility to help AI cite your content
08:37 How do I make my YouTube description cited by AI?
08:57 How to create timestamps in a YouTube video that are cited by AI
09:49 How captions burned into video are different from uploaded captions or subtitles
12:48 5. Freshness and evergreen balance make your content citable by AI
14:02 How can you check to see if your content is being cited by AI?
15:07 Wrapping up how to get your content cited by AI: GEO and SEO together
15:40 Accessibility has always been good for SEO and now for GEO
15:49 Why should I think about AI as a discovery channel?
16:30 Why subscribing to But Wait There’s Moore on Substack helps marketers
GEO: Making Content AI-Citable and Discoverable
[00:00:00] Think of it as this: you’re making your content citable by machines, not just findable by humans. Okay?
[00:00:08] So Skynet, we gotta make sure Skynet’s interested in what we’re putting out there. How can you make sure your content marketing is being cited by AI? This video is going to help you assess if AI is ignoring your content and how to fix it, making sure that your content is being delivered up as an answer to someone’s prompt or query in an AI chat of pretty much any platform.
[00:00:36] This pivots directly off of the Boss Level Monday I just did for February 23rd, talking about Perplexity totally backing out of serving ads or making any revenue off of advertising in their platform while ChatGPT is going in on it.
[00:00:53] And then also discussing how Anthropics Claude is also refusing to do ads. Google’s going farther into ads. I’m not sure where Copilot is sitting, but all of this discussing the fact that AI-cited content is very important, and you wanna be a part of it.
[00:01:10] In Boss Level Monday yesterday, we also talked about how YouTube is being more highly cited as a top AI-cited source than Reddit, which is a new development. You can go check out my Substack, become a paid subscriber to get access to Boss Level Mondays, where you can see the content there. Today’s video is free, though, for everybody who’s watching this on Substack or YouTube, or elsewhere.
[00:01:35] What I wanna talk to you about is to make sure that your content is mattering enough so that it is getting picked up by generative engine optimization, which is the AI version of SEO, basically.
Why does being cited by AI matter?
[00:01:47] So why this matters? As we discussed a little bit in yesterday’s video, Gartner is predicting a 25% drop in traditional search by the end of 2026. Traditional, meaning the old way we used to do it: let’s make sure Google or Yahoo, mostly Google, is picking us up and indexing our website and making sure that, ooh, if somebody puts a query into Google, we’re showing up and even advertising on Google to make sure we show up above as organic search results.
[00:02:14] The old way, the traditional way.
What is Generative Engine Optimization or GEO?
[00:02:16] People are increasingly asking AI instead of Googling. And that is a fact, and it’s gonna just keep increasing. SEO got you ranked in search results, but AI doesn’t show results. It synopsizes an answer, and then we’ll provide some links, saying, and by the way, here’s where I pulled that.
[00:02:32] We want you to appear in those results. If you’re not in the training data or retrieval set, you don’t exist, which means AI is constantly training itself based on what is it’s pulling from the internet and you want to make sure you’re training it so that if it knows, oh gosh, if somebody asked me this question that has to do with your brand, your product, or service, I really should make sure this seems like a reputable source.
[00:02:56] I should pull them in every time to deliver those results and that answer. That is generative engine optimization or GEO. And think of it as this: you’re making your content citable by machines, not just findable by humans. Okay?
[00:03:13] So Skynet, we gotta make sure Skynet’s interested in what we’re putting out there. Let’s get into this.
What are 5 things that AI looks for in your content?
[00:03:18] So, five things that AI looks for. I want you to really think about these things as you’re starting to craft content or even revamping your content.
- Structure over style to get cited by AI platforms.
[00:03:26] One, structure over style. AI will parse structure first. Headers, subheadings, bullet points, and numbered lists. This gets into as you’re posting on your website, how you’re formatting stuff and how you’re letting it flow, how you’ve organized, and even getting into that minutia of what phrases are headings versus what are subtitles, et cetera.
[00:03:50] Clear hierarchy will tell the AI what’s important. Okay And here’s the thing. FAQ formats are gold. If you don’t have FAQ sections on blogs, white papers, even your event landing pages, do that. Video landing pages as well. You’re literally answering the questions that people are asking AI.
[00:04:12] Converse to this, if your content is just one long prose block, AI’s gonna struggle to find and extract that answer ’cause you’re just, again, you’re just serving up prose. Think of it this way: when you do look up stuff in AI mode on Google, what is it showing you? It’s giving you, probably a descriptive paragraph, maybe two. But then there’s bullets, and it always has headings with bullet lists underneath, and it’s segmenting it.
[00:04:34] It lets you skim and find what’s important to you to get the answer. So look at your top-performing content. Do you have clear H2 and H3 headings that stand alone as answers? How are you writing and formatting those?
- Answer the question directly so AI cites your content.
[00:04:50] Second point, answer the question directly. Do not try to tease things out.
[00:04:56] So AI wants to pull a clean, quotable answer. Do not bury the lead. Say it right up front, just like I do on these videos. Put the question and the answer in the title, the heading in the first paragraph, somewhere at the top. Then you support it throughout with depth and nuance. This is very much not like an M. Night Shyamalan movie, where oh my God, there’s a twist at the end. That is not what we’re doing here.
[00:05:20] We’re doing the exact opposite. We’re gonna give away the ending at the start, and then we’re gonna support it throughout the rest of the blog. Okay. Think if AI could only grab one sentence, would it be useful enough to someone who needs to see that result? For key pages, a great thing you can try is try a TL;DR or a similar summary at the top. People skim.
[00:05:43] Attention deficit is the key here, but that is what AI is working off of. Put it right at the top.
- Demonstrate expertise in your content to get cited by AI, Three. Demonstrate expertise.
[00:05:53] Contrary to whatever people are thinking about SEO being gone and GEO being here now, it’s not altogether gone. EEAT still matters. And for a refresher, EEAT stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. All four need to be present in your content. Okay.
[00:06:11] AI systems are trained to prefer authoritative sources. So if you can provide things like author bios, credentials, company credibility signals, this is where PR media really comes into play. Can you get cited or mentioned by experts and authoritative journals, publications, sites that people go to as their resources for news, dependable, credible news that they’re going to stay aware of what’s going on in their industry.
[00:06:41] If you can be placed and be found in places like that adds to your credibility. Also, original data, research, and case studies, things that AI cannot get anywhere else. Case studies really come into play here. This is stuff that you’re building and researching based on what you have internally in that customer you have a relationship with, but also if you can conduct your own data.
[00:07:02] Surveys of your customers and things like that, getting quotes from them about the experiences that they are having in their industry, in their role.
[00:07:12] This is authoritative. If you’re citing other sources only, like creating a blog that only links out to other authoritative sources, you’re less likely to be the source. All you’re doing at that point is being a conduit. You’re being just like AI. So remember, add clear author attribution with credentials to your content written by so-and-so and their title with this many years in the field. Okay?
- Transcripts and accessibility to help AI cite your content
[00:07:38] Four. You need transcripts and accessibility. Y’all. Accessibility really should have been one, two, and three as well. It’s always been important. It’s even more important now, you know what? If this gets us to where people actually care about accessibility, formats, and features, great, let’s lean into it. But this is where AI actually uses that stuff in order to help cite your content more prevalently.
[00:08:04] As we mentioned in yesterday’s Boss Level Monday, and I mentioned at the top of this video, YouTube is now the number one cited social platform in LLMs. It’s over, Reddit. Okay. Why?
[00:08:14] Because of transcripts, because of captions, because of timestamps, and because of descriptions. I’m gonna show you my YouTube content right now. This is a video that is on my channel. I created it a few weeks ago. It’s called How to Create a Substack Publication. So what I might do even is I could even adjust that title to say how do I create a Substack publication?
How do I make my YouTube description cited by AI?
[00:08:37] But what you wanna do also is look at my description. I’ve got keyword rich description, including where this is coming from. What I need to do is probably adding in here, and this is delivered by Rachel Moore, marketing in 18 years, a CEO and founder of But Wait, There’s Moore.
[00:08:55] But I do have chapters in here. How to create timestamps in a YouTube video that are cited by AI. If you’re doing a YouTube video, this gets into timestamps, and this is exactly how you would format it.
[00:09:03] You need to actually mark in your video, like, where do I switch topics or switch gears, and what am I about to do in that? What I’m probably gonna do going forward now is format those chapter titles to be like, how do I do this? How I can this, okay. And make sure that’s way more clear. So, how I can communicate with subscribers, how I can create a publication on Substack?
[00:09:24] Formatting those in a YouTube description really is just putting that time stamp in there, so it’s two digits for the hour, colon, two digits for the seconds, space, and then whatever you wanna say that chapter title is, that’s how it does it. And notice up here, I can scroll all the way through.
[00:09:41] There’s that, and it’s gonna switch to that next chapter here. Okay, it separates it out. So that gives a person seeing this video the opportunity to skim.
How captions burned into video are different from uploaded captions or subtitles
[00:09:49] You can also see, I always do subtitles or captions on my videos. They’re burned or hard-burned into the video. So no matter where you see this video, these captions of the green are gonna appear, but you also want to make sure you’re incorporating that on YouTube.
[00:10:04] Guess what? This is an important distinction. AI cannot see that white and green text. Those captions I’ve burned into my video, it can’t read, see, or index those. What it can read and index are the closed captions, the subtitles that are apparent here. I can turn these off or on, but that is something that AI can index, which is why you should always be uploading captions or checking your captions on your YouTube videos.
[00:10:36] This is an SRT file that you can export any transcript from pretty much any program as an SRT file and upload it directly into your YouTube video as you’re setting it up and publishing it. And actually, let’s do that really quick. I’m gonna show you what happens in here. In order to do this, I can go into here, into subtitles, and this is where you would do it. This is available for free on YouTube.
[00:10:59] Anytime you upload a video, you don’t have to have any kind of premium subscription to do this. But once you get in here, it’s gonna auto generate subtitles unless, which I have done, I have uploaded a file that is from a transcript I already have from when I recorded this video. I’m recording this video today, and when this posts on YouTube, the words I am saying right now are going to be in an SRT file I have exported from the transcript and uploaded into the YouTube video, and they’ll appear and be able to toggle on and off.
[00:11:28] As importantly, not more importantly, ’cause accessibility is very important. As importantly, AI is going to be able to read that transcript. It’s gonna read those subtitles, it’s gonna read my description, it’s gonna read my title, so my video is indexable and able to be cited by AI because I’ve done these things. Okay, so keep that in mind, please. AI can read video content where there’s text attached.
[00:11:55] It cannot read text that is just appearing on the screen that is not also an uploadable text file that we used YouTube’s interface to upload. So podcasts with show notes and full transcripts, citable. This is why it’s important to maybe not just put your podcast out on Spotify or Apple. Of course, you do want the transcripts there, but you should also have a landing page for each episode on your website with the full transcript, there and the show notes, and timestamps.
[00:12:26] Think of it this way, video, without text support, is invisible to AI. And it makes sense. It can’t read a video. AI can’t watch the video either. It’s got to have copy to look through. So if you’re creating video content, always upload transcripts and always write detailed descriptions with keywords. That was a long one.
- Freshness and evergreen balance make your content citable by AI
[00:12:48] Five: freshness and evergreen balance. This is how you fix your content to be AI-citable. AI weighs recency for time-sensitive topics, but it also values comprehensive evergreen resources. The sweet spot is if you have evergreen content that you update regularly. Maybe you’ve got A blog that you wrote on your website that was from a year ago, and you’re giving a state of the union or update about, Hey, this is what’s going on with this particular feature or function or service or a product, but now it’s a year later, so instead of maybe blogging something new, why don’t you go back and update that and do a refresh on that blog and be like, okay, I’m gonna tweak a little bit, put an “updated as of (date)” and make sure you also update the author information as well ’cause now they’ve got an extra year of expertise.
[00:13:38] Also, make sure if there’s any stats presented, refresh those. If you have any new examples you can add or update, and it references “annually” at minimum. Your action item after this video: go audit your top 10 pages. When were they last updated? And by top 10, are they the most, the highest traffic that they’re driving, for your website?
[00:13:57] When were they last updated? If it’s been over two years time for a refresh.
How can you check to see if your content is being cited by AI?
[00:14:02] All right. Quickly, how can you check to make sure you’re being cited by AI? Go to ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude, or any of those ask questions your target audience would ask. If you need any help with this, go visit the website, answerthepublic.com.
[00:14:19] That’s a great way to go find out what are people asking about this. Questions where your content should ideally be delivered in the results. See if you get cited or get mentioned. Perplexity is nice ’cause it shows you sources, it makes this easy to check, be like, oh, did.
[00:14:35] Did my website get mentioned? That’s great. If competitors are showing up and you’re not, now you know your gap analysis. Now, paid tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs will also show you this, but other tools are starting to emerge. Goodie AI, Profound, and also Rankscale.ai.
[00:14:53] You can track your AI visibility at scale. I just tried actually Rankscale.ai and it did let me enter my website. It does like a free analysis in an effort to get you to do a free trial and then pay, but worth watching those.
Wrapping up how to get your content cited by AI: GEO and SEO together
[00:15:07] Finally, as we wrap up this video, I just wanna remind you, GEO is not replacing SEO, it’s adding onto it. The stuff you’ve been doing for SEO is always and will always be important, but we have to add that layer of GEO. We need to make it easy for AI to read our stuff and to skim it and to say, great, this answered the question quickly. I’m gonna deliver this result to the person entering the prompt right now.
[00:15:34] Most of these practices that we talked about today automatically just by virtue make your content better for humans too.
Accessibility has always been good for SEO, and now for GEO
[00:15:40] Remember, I’ve harped on the accessibility. That’s always been important. If you’ve not done it yet, you should do it now. Do it ’cause it’s the right thing to do, but now do it because it’s a helpful thing for you to do.
Why should I think about AI as a discovery channel?
[00:15:49] Okay? Structure, clarity, expertise, accessibility, and freshness are not radical changes that you should be doing to your content. But, as I said yesterday, if you’re not thinking about AI as a discovery channel yet, now is the time to realize it is okay. You might be late.
[00:16:09] Don’t miss the train entirely. Skynet cares about what your content is saying. So please subscribe to this channel.
[00:16:15] If this was helpful, please share it with your fellow marketers. More people need to know about these things. There’s such actionable stuff you can do just from this video, so go do those things. It will help you show up in AI search and will help your business. It’ll help your marketing, it’ll help everything.
Why subscribing to But Wait There’s Moore on Substack helps marketers
[00:16:30] Do feel free to check out my Substack as well. Paid subscribers get access to Boss Level Monday’s live streams, where I talk about marketing updates as well as marketing xp stuff like this AI stuff and how it works. And this video came directly from that.
[00:16:44] And then also Hot Mic Fridays, that’s all about venting and some sprinkling of podcasting in there. All right, thanks for watching. Been glorious to talk to you today, and we’ll see you all on the next video here on the channel.
[00:16:56] You’re still here. It’s over, but you should hit like on this video before you head out and subscribe if you wanna get “moore” videos that’ll help you realize how much “moore” there is to marketing.
[00:17:07] See what I did there?
But wait! (Yep, there’s more for subscribers.)
Exclusive content is available with Rachel’s livestream videos: Boss Level Mondays and Hot Mic Fridays. Start your week off with irreverence and real talk as you face down the work week of a marketer with Rachel at your side. Then, on Fridays, head to Hot Mic Fridays for unfiltered takes from the week, as well as podcasting and video tips you can always use. Subscribe here on Substack to access and join Rachel live!