Stop Playing the SEO Game. Start Winning at GEO.

We’ve all spent the last 20 years optimizing for Google’s crawler. Titles, meta tags, backlinks — the SEO playbook hasn’t really changed. But the way people find products has.

Search engines are turning into answer engines. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini don’t crawl in the old sense — they generate responses. They aren’t serving a “10 blue links” page, they’re synthesizing knowledge.

That’s why GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is the next frontier.

🔑 Enter llms.txt. It’s the robots.txt of the generative web. A new open standard that tells LLMs what content they can use and how. Your ecommerce site can publish product details, FAQs, and brand voice in machine-friendly ways that LLMs prefer to consume.

Here’s why I care at AFW (ecommerce business):
⚫SEO drives traffic. GEO drives answers. If customers ask ChatGPT “Where can I get a sofa under $800 delivered fast?” — I want AFW to be in that answer.
⚫Owning brand voice. Without llms.txt, LLMs piece together fragments from reviews, forums, competitors. With it, we teach the models to represent us accurately.
⚫First-mover advantage. Early adopters of GEO will shape how their categories get represented in the generative layer of search.

The takeaway:
👉 SEO will still matter, but GEO is how your brand survives in an AI-first discovery world.
👉 llms.txt is the first tactical step every enterprise site should take to prepare.

Generative engines are rewriting how customers discover and decide. The question is — will they be speaking in your voice or someone else’s?

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About the author

Jason Franklin fCTO

Results-oriented, failure-tolerant leader, highly technical with over 30 years of experience. I build teams, motivate my peers, influence decisions, and drive results.

Passions: GenAI | Biz | DevOps