While we were implementing solutions for our customers, they kept asking us, "Hey, Aykut, what do I have to do to be cited in ChatGPT for this specific query?" More and more customers were becoming aware that more traffic was coming from AI chatbots. They were asking what they had to adjust on their webpage and what content they had to generate. That's when it struck us: we had to build a product for that. This is how Ayzeo was born, out of a genuine need from our customers. We initially built a scanner to technically check what a page was about and then enhanced the tool more and more. Now, Ayzeo is serving customers by helping them get cited.

Andy: It's great that you guys did that. I've worked with a lot of entrepreneurs over the years and have been one myself, and one thing I've learned is that your customers will often direct you to where you need to go with your product. If you keep hearing the same requests or questions from your customers, it can usually lead you in the direction of building a very compelling product that actually solves a real problem they're having.

Aykut: Exactly. Customer feedback is gold. If you're an entrepreneur, you have to chase customers and get a feel for what they actually need, as you said. A lot of them just don't want another AI tool. There are a billion of those, but everybody wants to show up in these LLMs now. Unfortunately, they didn't want our AI agent, but luckily, they want Ayzeo.

Andy: That led you in the right direction, and here we are. So, the title of this webinar is about the future of SEO being GEO. What does that mean exactly in your mind?

Aykut: For the audience, everybody knows SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. GEO is a new term. It's also hard to Google it at first because "GEO" has a different meaning, like for magazines and so on. GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It's about optimizing your content so it gets cited in chatbots. It ensures that your website is discoverable by AI models and also understandable. It's not just about showing up in a result; it's also about having the right content in place so it gets understood. A good example is "apple." Apple could be the fruit or the well-known brand. With GEO, you influence the AI chatbots' understanding, and that's what GEO is all about. It's a kind of evolution of SEO. And we're not talking about geography, either.

Andy: But people see "GEO" and think "geography" for some reason.

Aykut: Exactly. It's the new term, people. GEO is the new SEO, so get used to that term, I guess. Could you explain how Gen AI is evolving how search works, especially for SaaS businesses?

Aykut: Sure. If you previously wanted to make a comparison between different SaaS tools, you would go to Google and search, "Ayzeo versus another competitor." You would look at the pages, see the results, click links, and try to understand what the link content was about. Now, with GenAI like ChatGPT or Gemini, you have more conversational answers. You don't have links anymore. ChatGPT gives you the answer about why Ayzeo, for example, is advantageous.

For SaaS businesses, your product needs to be understood and recommended by AI, not just found. If you aren't optimizing for AI, you're risking being left out of the conversation entirely. People won't ask further questions about the product because once they have a result in ChatGPT or Perplexity, they aren't going to search again. You are kind of fulfilled with the answer they give because it might already include five competitors in the comparison. If you aren't in that initial result, you won't be in a later one either.

Andy: What general tips do you have for helping businesses appear in GenAI search results on platforms like ChatGPT or Gemini? It sounds like question-based content, like FAQs, works. Any other tips you would have in terms of how you structure your data and content?

Aykut: Of course. As you mentioned, it's about having multimodal pages. You have to have high-quality content that also gives answers. It's more than just keywords. Previously, you would just drop a keyword and add some marketing text to it. That has changed. The AI is going to read it, so it has to be readable, which means you have to follow the right HTML text, for example. That's very technical. But it also has to be understood semantically. This is why you use a question-and-answer format. It's how you train an AI: "This is the question, and I expect you to give this answer." That's why this content performs much better than just static knowledge pages. Also, if you have comparison tables in a blog post, for example, with check marks—"yes, included," "not included," "better here," and "better there"—it helps the AI put you in an advantageous position against your competitors in the answer.

Andy: So, definitely not long-form blog content. It's good to really structure it with clear titles, maybe bullet points, as well as tables that clearly delineate the differences and options.

Aykut: Exactly. If you make it too long, something that's several pages long, it's like humans: the AI doesn't want to read it all because it can't. You have limited context windows in the AI, so you can't just put everything into it and expect it to understand. There's a limited amount of data the AI is able to understand. If you ask ChatGPT a complex query, it's going to visit several pages based on the search results. An interesting fact that maybe not everybody knows is that ChatGPT uses Bing as a search engine, but all the results the AI chatbot gets are put into a limited context window. If you're able to be precise and brief with your content and not "bloat" it, you will more likely be used as an answer instead of having a bloated article that is not precise enough. So the AI is like a human; it doesn't want to read all that stuff. It wants to get to the point. It's not even capable of reading all of it. Unfortunately, it's already learning our bad habits.

Andy: So, Ayzeo, how do you help businesses? How does your platform work specifically? Do you run a bunch of queries to see if a client is showing up for certain keywords? Can you maybe explain the process for how your platform works so people better understand it?

Aykut: It's actually pretty straightforward. First, you set up a project, which is your domain or website. Then we do a technical analysis of your website, checking if you've taken care of the traditional SEO tasks you should do. We also look at the content you have on your page to see if it's high quality and if it sets you apart from others, as well as if it's unique. If it's a generic website about, say, New York City, explaining what the city is about, with just facts, then it's most likely Wikipedia that gets cited. But if you have something really unique, that's a special tip for hyper-local queries, like "Chinese food in town," then you're, of course, more likely to be cited. So in the first step, we analyze the website's content and give you a readiness score from 0 to 100. We tell you what's wrong with your website and how to fix it. We generate the fixes for you so you just have to copy and paste them.

Andy: Yeah, that's too easy.

Aykut: That's why we built it. We're lazy, so we needed something that works for us. There's an easy button for this. Exactly. In the next phase, we generate prompts based on your brand and product where you want to be cited if a user asks this query in ChatGPT, for example. Let's use NachoNacho as an example. If somebody asks, "What is the best SaaS marketplace?" you want NachoNacho to be mentioned, and this is what we offer in the setup. We pre-generate the prompts for you, and of course, you can adjust them and save them for your product. Once you have them saved, we check the citation rate of these prompts for you technically in the background. You can also do this manually to see if you're being cited or not, if you're important enough. And we offer content generation to help you build content that you can put on your blog or pay someone to post on their blog to make paid blog posts. We track this and tell you every month, "Hey, your citation rate has changed. Lucky you, it increased. You're doing a great job." Or, "It decreased because a competitor got in front of you and did a way better job with content." So that's what we do with the tracking and analysis. Also, AI is advancing every day. It's really horrible to keep up, even as an "expert." I just say "expert" because I'm not sure if I'm one, but I'm working with it every day, and it's really hard to keep up to date. That's what we implement into Ayzeo so you don't have to take care of all the advancements. Maybe with the latest AI overview from Google, they gave us a requirements sheet, and you have to put this and this and this into it. What we do is, we adapted Ayzeo, and you'll see every month if you're doing well and what actions you need to take. A lot of people don't know that you could even ask ChatGPT for feedback on how it does the citations and everything.

Andy: Exactly.

Aykut: I mean, it's a pretty new topic still for a lot of people. If we have technical people here around in the audience, you can reverse engineer it in the web's ChatGPT. If you go to the developer console of Chrome, you can see the search queries ChatGPT is doing. It's really interesting. A little-known fact.

Andy: What kind of businesses are most at risk of being left out? It sounds like people who have relied on long-form content or websites where people might be able to get the information directly from ChatGPT or Gemini so they don't have to actually click through. Could you explain a little more about what businesses are at risk and maybe what they can do to maintain relevance and keep that click-through rate high and keep people actually going to their website?

Aykut: Yes. There are a lot of at-risk businesses right now, especially websites that depend on advertising. They're suffering. News websites, blogs, and online magazines that rely on organic traffic and the resulting ad revenue have started to suffer because people have started to use AI. If you look at Semrush statistics from last year, they got more than 10% of their sign-ups now coming from AI chatbots rather than Google. There's a big shift happening right now. And I see myself more and more asking ChatGPT for research rather than doing the research on my own. Why should I? AI is advancing a lot every day, but what does that mean? Fewer people are going to click on links on Google. Also, in the past, if you were a website manager, you would have seen a high churn rate because people clicked, didn't see what they wanted, and left and went to another page, but you were still able to play out ads. Nowadays, you have less traffic because ChatGPT is giving the answer, and you see it in Google's AI overview; you already have your answer. You only click if you need more information.

So, you have a lot of businesses at risk here that solely rely on high traffic, but there's an upside that has to be seen. You will get fewer people, but you will have more high-quality people. So you won't have as much churn for the website. But, of course, you also have all these travel and hospitality platforms, review aggregators, local service providers, and so on. They are all at risk. It's one part to be cited and another part to get the user to click on the page and bring them to you. The great thing about SaaS products is that this is a time where big SaaS products haven't adapted yet. So, if you are a small company and don't have a huge distribution like others, doing these small adjustments already helps you get cited. For SaaS, it's great because you already have a prospect, so they are going to make a buying decision soon. I actually see a good upside here, especially if you are listed on big platforms such as NachoNacho or Capterra. This will help you a lot to get new customers on board. But, yeah, there's a lot of things happening, especially in the traffic market right now, and only relying on traditional search will most likely kill a business.

Andy: Is traditional search dead, or is it something complementary that you think you should use? It sounds like there are some complementary aspects to it, you know? If you're structuring your site the right way, you'll show up better on SEO search results on, say, Google but also for ChatGPT and these other LLMs.

Aykut: So, I mean, traditional SEO is not dead, but it's evolving. Ranking high in a search engine still matters. So you have to take care of that. You can't just focus on something like GEO because it's complementary, as you said. It's building up based on the foundation of SEO. GEO is, of course, a more broad content topic where you try to influence the AI chatbot, and that's why it's complementary. You try to optimize for AI understandings and also for the citation rate. You also have to see that AI chatbots are not searching like humans do. They are using way different keywords. They're still relying on Google and Bing, but if they use different keywords than a human does, they'll see different results as well. And what AI chatbots do as well is, they see the snippet, the description, and then they decide if they're going to visit the page or not, even based on that small part of information. So, it's all complementary, and you still have to take care of SEO, but, of course, nowadays you have to take care of GEO as well; otherwise, you're going to lose a lot of traffic.

Andy: What kind of snippet does it look at first? Maybe like the H1 tags for the website and the metatags? Maybe the website description as well?

Aykut: Exactly. That's a lot of information. Everything you have out there, like structured JSON data for your website, even the Open Graph data for social sharing that you've seen as a preview in your chat tools. But also entity-based SEO, and if you think even more hyper-locally, more machine-readable data to give the opening hours, for example, of your location or something like that.

Andy: Can you walk us through a typical audit? What does it look like when you first start with a client and where do they usually end up?

Aykut: They usually end up doing very well. We have the majority of customers having a higher rate, up to 80% or a little bit higher, for the AI readiness score we have. What we are doing, of course, is a technical health check, which is basically an SEO check. But also, as I mentioned, the content quality, the uniqueness of the content, the structured data, and also AI-specific signals where we say this is something you should try to convince the AI that your product stands out. This is what we check with Ayzeo. You just enter the URL, and it checks all of this, plus the citation rate. If it's a progress, right? You start at 80, maybe, and you want to get 100 on the technical side, but also for the citation rate, you have to do your homework. You have to generate content; you have to place this content on different pages with a strong link authority as well. So it's not something where you can say, "Okay, I'll just do it, and then it's finished." It's something you have to do continuously in an iterative process.

Andy: And can you share some of the results that you've had with some clients, like after they've been through this whole audit process and the whole implementation?

Aykut: What we have seen is that with the technical adjustments, like the basic metatags and structured data you have for SEO in Google, you get a better demonstration of your search results with sub-pages and so on. This is pretty common, like you have "how it works" or "login." These are just small gains already. But for GEO, we had a customer go from a 0% citation rate to a 20% citation rate in two months. So it takes time. It's not something you can do immediately because your content has to propagate, and search engines have to become aware of it and see it as a strong authority. It takes time, but we help with the generation of the content. You get content from us that's 80% finished, and you just do the polishing. You decide with us where you're going to place it, which makes sense, maybe industry-specific pages, and then we're going to track this and see the outcomes. But as I said, this is something that takes more time than just a technical fix, because a technical fix is easy; it can be done immediately by the team. The other one is content propagation. This takes a little more time, but we're seeing results. This is great.

Andy: Nothing good comes easy.

Aykut: Exactly. If it's easy, everybody could do it. Be patient.

Andy: Same with SEO, right? SEO takes time, so expect the same from a GEO perspective.

Aykut: Exactly. It never changed; it's just slightly different. But, so, backlinks aren't as important anymore, right? So I guess what are some other signals that ChatGPT and these GenAI platforms look for to determine what is good content to reference? We mentioned the way websites are structured, but are there specific sources they look for that act as a replacement for backlinks?

Aykut: Yes, for sure. Chatbots are combining information. It's not like they visit just one page, and it's fine. They do literal research, like we humans do, visiting pages and looking at them. They also like third-party directories where they get consistent, clear, authoritative signals, such as Capterra or NachoNacho. They are also, of course, looking at structured data to see if it's relevant. Let's come back to the Apple topic again, as I mentioned. If you search for "apple," an LLM is going to understand if the user wants the apple to eat or the Apple brand to buy an iPhone, for example. You have to have the structured data on your website telling it that it's a brand and not something to eat. And the AI is also looking at the structured data to understand what the content is about. So, if you rank high for "Apple" but you are not the product the user is searching for, you are not going to be cited. And for this, that's what I meant, it's combining information. It visits the webpage, understands the context, and puts it all together in the end.

Andy: And from what I've seen from an external site perspective, I've seen a lot of references to Reddit and Medium. Does ChatGPT also cite social media and forum sources? Is that a good place you want your brand to show up in?

Aykut: Yes, Reddit is especially strong in that case. Of course, Reddit has a lot of "Ask Reddit" threads where people ask the questions you see in prompts nowadays, and that's why they have a lot of authority. If you enter the same question into Google, you'll get a Reddit post. That's how it works, and it makes sense for a brand to be present in Reddit and post the content you've generated as an answer to a query in "Ask Reddit," for example. So they are looking at it if it's not too specific. Reddit can sometimes be a really broad topic with general answers, but if you get into a more specific niche, you are most likely to be cited on different pages.

Andy: That's good insight. Where do you see the intersection of AI, maybe with a lot of agentic voice tools coming out, and hyper-local SEO? How can people tie this whole AI strategy together to be effective over the next few years with their marketing?

Aykut: I've built a personal AI assistant before and was already controlling it via voice. So, I think with advancements in hardware, you can say, "Hey, AI, where can I find the next bakery?" There will be much more of that, and to be hyper-locally relevant, you have to take care of structured data, which means you put in your location, your opening hours, and even your offerings because that's what the AI is going to read. If you have a local business but don't have this data on your webpage, you are most likely to be ignored because the answer the AI will generate would not be sufficient. Imagine you have the best cake in town, but you can't specify your opening hours. You are not going to be recommended because the user is going to ask, "Is it open right now?" And the AI will answer, "I don't know, maybe yes, have a look, go yourself, drive an hour to see it." So, even when you go to hyper-local, it's even more important right now. If you see the advancements with all the assistants, we're going to do less manual research, even not opening Google Maps. I mean, I can say, "Hey, I'm in lower Manhattan right now. Where can I have breakfast?" "I'm on this street. Give me the next place where I can get a croissant or something like that." And if you have polished your website in that manner, you are nearly 100% sure that you are going to be cited and not the bakery that doesn't even have a website.

Andy: That's good points there. What's next for Ayzeo? What are you guys working on next, and where do you see the company in the next few years?

Aykut: Hopefully, in five years, we are the place to be for SEO and GEO. We want to power all the websites that take care of AI visibility, hopefully for millions of businesses. As an entrepreneur, that's my hope.

Andy: You guys have a great product, so who doesn't want it?

Aykut: Yes, thank you. We want to become a kind of standard. I mean, we all know the big players for SEO in the past, like Semrush and so on, well-known brands. You know the name, and you know the product, and that's where we want to get. What we are integrating now into Ayzeo and will be releasing soon are more integrations into platforms. We have WordPress integrations where you don't have to be a technical person to implement all the fixes. It's doing the job for you. So we will do something for wix.com and Webflow and so on to integrate more and more into different platforms. And what we are also working on right now is a bigger project management system for bigger companies. We've already had requests from customers who say, "Hey, I need to handle more projects, like 30 projects. I need to have user management with different rights." These are also upcoming soon. And, of course, we want to add more chatbots to our system.

Andy: Very cool. A lot of exciting things are going on over there. So, where can people learn more about your company and pick up your services today?

Aykut: Just visit ayzeo.com. It's self-explanatory, but if you need help, please feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn or via the address you see on the webpage. I'm happy to help. I can also give a demo, and yeah, have a look around. We have a free scanner already, so you don't have to sign up. You can see the results of how well you're doing. So check your website, and if you have things to do, we're here to help.

Andy: Excellent. Well, we're also a proud partner of you guys as well. You can grab it today in the NachoNacho B2B SaaS and AI marketplace. And what's your website domain again for anybody that's listening?

Aykut: Ayzeo.com.

Andy: Amazing. Well, Aykut, I think you have a great product. I'm excited to learn more about it today. Thanks for coming on, and I look forward to meeting you in New York City when you come out to our event on September 9th.

Aykut: Yes, see you in three weeks. And thank you for the time and for having me. I really appreciate it.

Andy: You, too, bud.