Where should a GEO / AI search program start before optimizing pages for individual AI platforms?

Start with the information system that AI products can retrieve and corroborate, not with platform-specific hacks.

1. Define the entities. Establish the brand, products/services, people, locations, and relationships you want machines to understand. Use stable names, URLs, descriptions, and identifiers.

2. Build source consistency. Your website, profiles, authoritative citations, documentation, press mentions, and structured data should agree on core facts. Contradictory entity data makes retrieval and synthesis harder.

3. Create answerable content. Important pages should contain clear statements, definitions, comparisons, steps, evidence, and concise passages that can stand on their own when retrieved out of context.

4. Strengthen source authority. AI systems often synthesize from multiple sources. Publish evidence worth citing and earn independent references where the market naturally discusses your category.

5. Keep technical access clean. Important content should be crawlable, render reliably, use canonical URLs, and avoid hiding key facts behind client-only interactions.

6. Connect entities with structured data and internal linking. Schema is not a magic AI ranking switch, but it can reinforce machine-readable relationships when it matches visible content.

7. Measure with a stable prompt/query set. Track whether the brand is mentioned, cited, described accurately, and associated with target topics across several answer engines. Record sources used, not just whether the brand appears.

The core principle is retrieval readiness + evidence + corroboration. Platform-specific optimization comes later. A durable GEO program makes the web's evidence about the brand clearer and more consistent so different AI systems can reach similar conclusions independently.