How To Do GEO For A Website: 9 Steps With Free Tools

Here's how to do GEO for website owners in nine steps, using the exact free workflow I show in my latest video.

GEO means generative engine optimisation, which is the work of making your business the name that Google AI, Gemini or ChatGPT gives when someone asks a question.

The short version is simple.

You export your Google Search Console data, hand it to a free AI agent like Hermes, let it find the topics that can win in AI search, write case-study pages with an SEO skill, then fact-check and publish.

This page is the operator walkthrough, so every step comes with the actual prompt or check I'd run.

If you'd rather have someone look at your site with you first, book my free one-to-one GEO, AEO AI audit and get a custom game plan.

How To Do GEO For A Website: The 9 Steps At A Glance

This table is the whole method on one screen, so you can see where you are before you read the detail.

Step	What you do	Free tool I use
1	Check who the AI answers name today for your buyer questions.	Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Gemini
2	Export your performance data to a CSV file.	Google Search Console
3	Ask an agent to find the topics and keywords that can win in AI search.	Hermes Agent with a free brain in OpenCode
4	Write one case-study-led page per topic with an SEO skill.	Hermes Agent or Claude plus your own results
5	Publish the same answer from different angles on several sites and platforms.	Your own sites, videos and community posts
6	Publish on new topics within 24 hours of them appearing.	An agent watching your niche
7	Make sure crawlers can reach you and keep your schema tidy.	robots.txt and the Rich Results Test
8	Fact-check every line by hand, then publish.	You, with Google's 1 October 2026 guidance open
9	Measure clicks and AI impressions, then pick the next topic.	Search Console and a weekly re-check of step 1

Steps two to four are the workflow from my Hermes Agent GEO video.

Steps four to six are the three moves I call the answer engine, which are be the source, be everywhere and be first.

What You Need Before You Start Doing GEO

You don't need a paid tool stack to do any of this.

In my video I run it from my Agent OS, but you can run the same process with Hermes Agent on its own.

Hermes Agent is an open-source agent from Nous Research, and its GitHub repo carries the MIT licence.

For the brain, I use OpenCode, which describes itself as an open-source AI coding agent with free models included.

When I recorded the video, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash was free inside OpenCode, but free models change, so check what's on offer the day you set it up.

You also need a verified site in Google Search Console, which Google's own help page calls a free service.

🔥 Want my exact How To Do GEO For A Website setup, step by step? Inside the AI Profit Boardroom you get step-by-step video trainings, my installable Agent OS and four coaching calls a week with 3,400+ members building real automations. → Join the AI Profit Boardroom

Step 1: Get A Baseline Of Your AI Visibility

Before you change anything, you need to know who the AI answers name today.

Write down ten to twenty questions a real buyer would ask, such as "best [your service] in [your city]" or "who is the best [your topic] expert".

Run each one in Google AI Mode, look for an AI Overview in normal Google, and ask ChatGPT and Gemini the same question.

Log three things for each question, which are the names it gives, the pages it cites and whether you appear at all.

When I ran "best geo expert", my content showed up in the Google AI answer at the top and in the first organic spot as well.

When I asked AI Mode for the best GEO experts to follow in 2026, it listed me first and linked to my sites.

Perplexity also listed me among GEO experts, although I'll be honest that I don't really use Perplexity.

Those are my own screens, not a promise for yours.

If you want a deeper version of this step, my AEO audit walkthrough shows how to build a full prompt log.

Step 2: Export Your Google Search Console Data To CSV

This is where my workflow starts, and it costs nothing.

Open the Performance report in Search Console, set the date range you care about, and use the export button to download the data.

Google's help page confirms that many reports have an export button for both the chart and the table data.

I export to CSV because every agent can read a CSV file without any setup.

Export the queries and the pages, because the agent needs to see both what people typed and which URLs earned the clicks.

One honest note is that this is Google organic data, not a full picture of AI traffic.

Google and the AI engines still don't report AI traffic in much detail, so treat the CSV as your best proxy for what's already working.

Step 3: Ask Hermes To Find Your GEO Topics

Now you hand the CSV to Hermes and ask it a plain question.

This is close to the prompt I use in the video.

Can you analyse this and, based on what's actually working, give me keyword and topic ideas to rank inside AI search engines?

In my run, Hermes built a report artifact right inside the workspace.

It showed total clicks, the brand share of clicks, the non-brand click-through rate and my September clicks.

It pulled out what was working, such as comparison articles, my Agent OS and agentic OS clusters, the free AI community topic and my Antigravity and Hermes topics.

It worked out the averages and finished with a verdict on my best pages.

That verdict is the gold, because it tells you which kinds of pages Google already trusts you for.

How I read the report as an operator

I look for content types that earn non-brand clicks and clusters where several of my pages already rank.

I then turn the top ideas into a short list of questions that sound like something a person would type into AI Mode.

Step 4: Write Case-Study-Led Pages With An SEO Skill

This step is move one of the answer engine, which is be the source.

I give Hermes my SEO skill and access to the sites, such as WordPress or Netlify, so it can draft and publish directly.

My SEO skill is roughly a 100-point checklist, and it tells the agent to write everything from a case-study angle.

The demo prompt in my video is just as simple as the first one.

Create an SEO article using your SEO skill and the keyword "GEO examples" and publish to aiprofitboardroom.com.

The case-study angle matters more than any other part of the skill.

AI Mode describes me as widely recognised as a top practitioner because of public testing and deployment, which is right there on my screen.

To be named as the expert, you have to show that you've actually used the thing you're writing about.

Your case study is simply whatever you work on day to day, such as a client job, a test or an experiment.

If you run experiments in Claude, you can export them to Hermes, or you can write the article inside Claude instead.

I go deeper on that version in my post on using Hermes Agent for SEO.

Here is my GEO examples video, which shows what the published pages look like when they start getting named.

📞 Not sure which topics your Search Console data is pointing at? Book a free AEO SEO strategy session and my team will look at your site, your competitors and the keywords you're closest to winning. → Get your custom game plan for Google and AI search

Step 5: Be Everywhere With Different Angles

AI answers read the pages that rank and sum up what they say.

I explain it like five friends recommending the same restaurant, because if five good pages say the same name, the AI repeats that name.

So the second move is to be everywhere.

I run multiple websites, each with a different angle, all pointing to the same answer.

That's how I can show up two to four times on page one for one search.

I also publish on other platforms, and my subreddit, AI SEO Insider, ranks on page one too.

There's a safety benefit as well, because if one site drops you've still got the others.

The operator rule for being everywhere

Every version has to be genuinely useful on its own.

Google's guide to optimising for generative AI features warns that making separate pages for every search variation, mainly to manipulate rankings or AI answers, breaks its scaled content abuse policy.

The same guide says chasing inauthentic mentions across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem.

So I treat "everywhere" as different useful takes on one true answer, never as copies.

🚀 Ready to put How To Do GEO For A Website to work in your business? Inside the AI Profit Boardroom you get step-by-step video trainings, my installable Agent OS and four coaching calls a week with 3,400+ members building real automations. → Join the AI Profit Boardroom

Step 6: Be First On New Topics

The third move is speed.

I try to create content within 24 hours of a topic appearing.

When Jev AI dropped, I published on searches like "Jev architecture" and "Jev waitlist" that same weekend.

Being first means your page is often the only good answer when the AI goes looking for one.

As an operator, I set the agent to watch the launches and news in my niche and flag anything new each morning.

The agent drafts the first page fast, but I still check every fact before it goes live.

Step 7: Check Crawler Access And Schema Basics

None of the steps above help if the crawlers can't read your pages.

Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, but the page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet.

Run through this short checklist on your main site.

Your robots.txt file should not block Googlebot from the pages you want named.
If you want to appear in ChatGPT search, OpenAI's bots page says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in its search answers.
Perplexity's bots guide says PerplexityBot surfaces and links sites in its search results, so allow it if you want to be there.
Search Console now has a Search generative AI control, and you should check it's set to include your site, which is the default.
Your important content should be in plain text on the page rather than hidden in images.

For schema, Google's guide says there's no special schema.org markup you need for AI features.

It still recommends structured data as part of normal SEO, because it helps with rich results, so I check key pages in the Rich Results Test.

You also don't need an llms.txt file for Google, because the same guide says Google Search ignores those files.

Step 8: Fact-Check Every Line, Then Publish

Google updated its page on using generative AI content on 1 October 2026.

It says it's "critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content" before you publish.

That review also covers metadata such as title elements, meta descriptions, structured data and image alt text.

Google explains that generative models predict likely words rather than retrieving facts, which is why they sometimes make things up.

So in my workflow, the agent can draft and even push to the site, but a human checks every number, name, claim and meta field first.

Case-study pages make this much easier, because you were there for the test and you know what really happened.

I'm adding a manual fact-checking list inside the AI Profit Boardroom for exactly this reason.

Step 9: Measure What Changed And Pick The Next Topic

Once a page is live, go back to the questions from step one and run them again after a couple of weeks.

Note whether the AI answer now names you, cites you or still skips you.

Google's guide also points to the Generative AI performance report in Search Console, which shows impressions from Google's AI features and has its own export button.

Google says it rolled that report out to all websites worldwide as of 31 August 2026.

AI Mode does send real traffic, and I show it on screen in the video.

One of my sites went from zero to more than 1,300 clicks a day, and two other sites are on the same trajectory.

Those are my results from my own screens, so read them as proof the method can work rather than a forecast for your site.

Then you feed the new CSV back into step three and go round again.

📞 Want a second pair of eyes before you publish? Grab my free one-to-one GEO, AEO AI audit and we'll pick the searches you're closest to winning together. → Book the free call

Common Mistakes When You Do GEO For A Website

These are the mistakes I see most often when people try this for the first time.

They skip the baseline, so they can't tell whether anything changed.
They let the agent write generic pages with no case study, so there's nothing for the AI to cite.
They copy the same page onto five sites instead of writing five genuinely different angles.
They buy into hacks like llms.txt files or chunked content, which Google's guide says you can ignore for Google Search.
They publish AI drafts without a human fact-check, which goes against Google's 1 October 2026 guidance.
They expect a guarantee, but nobody can promise what an AI answer will say, and that includes me.

One more limit is worth saying plainly, because this workflow needs real experience, so if you have no results yet, your first job is to go and create some.

How To Get Help Doing GEO

There are two routes if you want help.

The first is the free AEO SEO strategy session, which I call a free one-to-one GEO, AEO AI audit.

It's a call rather than a written report, where my team looks at your site, your competitors and the keywords you're closest to winning, then gives you a custom game plan.

The second is the AI Profit Boardroom, where you get my Agent OS, my SEO skill and checklist, an AI SEO automation section and four coaching calls a week.

There's also a member map with 3,400+ members, and you can DM me inside, where I can even take a look at your website.

Also On Our Network

FAQ: How To Do GEO For A Website

What is the first step to do GEO for a website?

The first step is a baseline.

Ask your real buyer questions in Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Gemini, then log who gets named and which pages get cited.

Can I do GEO for my website for free?

Yes, the workflow in my video uses free tools.

Search Console is a free Google service, Hermes Agent is open source and OpenCode includes free models, although which models are free can change.

Why does Search Console data help with GEO?

AI answers lean on pages that already rank, so your Search Console data shows which topics and page types Google already trusts you for.

An agent can read the CSV and turn it into keyword and topic ideas for AI search.

Do I need special schema or an llms.txt file for GEO?

Google's guide says there's no special schema needed for its AI features and that Google Search ignores llms.txt files.

Normal structured data is still worth using for rich results.

How long does GEO take to work?

It varies a lot, and nobody can guarantee a timeline.

One of my sites went from zero to more than 1,300 clicks a day, but that's my result from my own screens and not a promise.

Is the free strategy session a written GEO report?

No, it's a free one-to-one call rather than a written report.

My team looks at your site, your competitors and the keywords you're closest to winning, then gives you a custom game plan for Google and AI search.

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About Julian

I'm Julian Goldie, an SEO entrepreneur, author and founder of the AI Profit Boardroom, which has 3,400+ members.

I help business owners scale with AI agents, automation and SEO.

I started Goldie Agency on my own, and it is now a 7-figure SEO and link-building agency with 70+ people.
I've grown my YouTube channel to 400,000+ subscribers.
I wrote "Link Building Mastery".
My Udemy courses have taught 29,000+ students.

→ Get my best AI training inside the AI Profit Boardroom

Export your Search Console data today, run the nine steps, book a free strategy session if you want a second pair of eyes, and you'll know exactly how to do GEO for website growth.