I spent a month optimizing two sites for AI citations (GEO) and got zero results — here's the actual diagnosis

Since you now have two sites and a real before and after, log the answers not just the index state: date, question, engine, and whether the answer named you or a competitor or nobody. Ten fixed buyer questions run weekly is enough, and after 30 days the pattern per site is readable even with zero citations, because "nobody gets named" is itself a finding. If you want that as a ready made 30 day setup with the prompts and a tracker sheet, I sell it as a $29 one time lab, no subscription.

The useful diagnosis is that you were optimizing the top of a chain whose first dependency had failed. I would turn the recovery into a measured cohort: submission date, Google and Bing index date, crawler visits, first AI appearance, citation frequency, and referral traffic. That separates discovery from citation and shows whether the 4–8 week expectation is real for each engine.

this is a genuinely useful post because the embarrassing answer is the common one: GEO isnt a separate magic layer, its classic SEO fundamentals wearing a new acronym. if google cant index you, theres no upstream for any AI to cite, full stop. a few things that unblock that first step fastest on a new site. 1) you nailed it on backlinks, a brand new domain with zero inbound links gives googlebot almost no reason to crawl deep, even a handful of real links from already-indexed sites shifts crawl priority fast. 2) internal linking, orphan posts with nothing pointing at them often just never get discovered, make sure every article is linked from something thats already indexed. 3) IndexNow plus Bing webmaster tools specifically, since Bings index is what ChatGPT search leans on, thats a direct pipe most people skip entirely. 4) once youre actually indexed, the thing that gets you CITED rather than just ranked is content that answers one specific question completely, with concrete numbers and named steps, because thats what a model can lift as a clean citation. vague listicles almost never get quoted. how many of the 20 posts are indexed now that you found the real problem?

The indexing step being the blocker is the part most GEO content completely skips. Every playbook I've seen starts at "write authoritative content" and assumes the crawl infrastructure is already solid. It rarely is, especially on newer domains or sites that launched quickly without a systematic submission process.

The IndexNow/Bing Webmaster setup is probably doing more work than the GSC request here. ChatGPT's search layer pulls from Bing's index, so if Bing doesn't know your pages exist, you're invisible to ChatGPT regardless of how well-optimised the content is.

Curious whether you're tracking time-to-first-citation separately for each site once indexing is confirmed, or treating them as one dataset. The domain authority difference between the two might show up in citation lag.

One more gate after indexing that nobody's named yet: most of the traffic citations eventually win you will be invisible. Assistants answer in place, so the reader who saw your brand in a ChatGPT answer either never visits, or shows up weeks later as direct traffic or branded search. Citation counts and your analytics will both undercount what GEO actually earned.

Worth wiring the measurement side before the 4-8 week clock starts: a fixed basket of queries you re-run weekly to track share-of-answer (your leading metric while clicks stay invisible), plus an "asked an AI assistant" option in the signup "where did you find us?" question as the lagging one. Otherwise in two months you'll be diagnosing "GEO doesn't convert" with the same missing-plumbing problem, one layer up.

It reminds us that optimization will only help once we have the plumbing in place. ~

It’s easy to jump straight into various techniques like schema, content structure and GEO tactics because they feel like the “interesting” stuff. If the content is not indexed by the search engines, then redirecting does not hold any significance.

I always find it useful to check things in order: can the page be crawled, is it indexed, is it discoverable, and only then worry about performance.

A key takeaway from the clock not even beginning. Occasionally, the optimal path is understanding which step you have yet to take.

Solid diagnosis — indexing is the first gate, and most GEO playbooks skip it. One thing I'd add: don't measure GEO by citation counts. A citation is a lead, not a conversion. The signal that matters is the conversation behind it — which assistant surfaced you, what the user asked, whether they clicked and acted. We built amami.dev to track exactly that, and it changed how we judge AI traffic.

Zero indexed across 20+ articles explains the silence, but I'd expect the next month to stay quiet too, since models tend to cite the page that already has links pointing at it, not the newest one you pinged. Viewfy's citation checks keep surfacing answers assembled from Reddit threads and roundups rather than the vendor's own blog. The backlink gap is doing more damage here than the schema.

The useful diagnosis is that GEO work has a dependency chain, and indexing is the first gate. I’d add a small preflight before every content batch: confirm pages are indexed, inspect crawl discovery, and test one query in both Google and Bing before interpreting citation results. Otherwise structured data and llms.txt can become activity without evidence. The 4–8 week clock also makes cohort tracking important: record publish date, index date, first citation date, and query type per page. That separates technical delay from a content or intent problem. Once the pages are indexed, will you compare the ten manually submitted URLs against untouched pages as a control? That would make the diagnosis much stronger.

This hits close to home. I just launched two apps — ***** and ***** realized I'd been so focused on the App Store that I never checked if Google had even indexed my landing pages.

The IndexNow tip is gold. Setting that up today.

One thing I'd add: for app landing pages specifically, I found that having a proper privacy policy and terms page (real URLs, not just in-app) helped with indexing speed — Google seems to treat those as trust signals.

The “the clock hadn’t even started” realization is probably the most useful part here. Easy to spend weeks optimizing the final step of a funnel without checking whether the prerequisite step is actually working.