The 5-Engine GEO Playbook: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, AI Overviews

"GEO" gets thrown around as if there''s one optimisation playbook for AI search. There isn''t. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews each cite differently — and the mistake is treating them as one channel.

This is the framework we use to track and win citations across all five at once. Real prompts, real citation tracking, real entity SEO moves.

Why each engine cites differently

The five major AI search surfaces have different training data, different system prompts, and different real-time grounding behaviour:

• ChatGPT (with browse) — leans on Bing search results plus its training corpus. Prefers structured, citable passages.
• Perplexity — uses real-time web search per query. Aggressively cites sources inline. Schema and clean structure help significantly.
• Gemini — uses Google''s index plus web grounding. Cites less often than Perplexity but rewards entity clarity.
• Claude — uses Brave Search for grounding. Less citation-heavy but increasingly visible in B2B research.
• Google AI Overviews — pulls from existing top-ranked content plus featured snippets. Owning snippets is the strongest signal.

The 4-step measurement framework

1. Build a prompt set. 100-200 prompts your buyers actually ask LLMs. Mine these from sales calls, support tickets and competitor research.
2. Track weekly across all 5 engines. Run each prompt through every engine, log which sources were cited.
3. Calculate share-of-citation. Per engine, per prompt cluster, per competitor. This becomes your dashboard.
4. Tune to the gaps. If you''re cited in ChatGPT but not Perplexity, your structure is off. If everywhere except Gemini, your entity signals are weak.

The optimisation playbook

For ChatGPT and Perplexity

Both reward clean, citable structure. Make sure every key page has:

• Answer-first opening paragraphs (40-80 words).
• Validated FAQ schema where applicable.
• Sourced statistics with original citations.
• Clear authorship and dating signals.

For Gemini and AI Overviews

Both lean heavily on Google''s graph and existing rankings. Focus on:

• Wikidata profile aligned with your brand.
• sameAs entity coverage across the open web.
• Featured snippet capture for category-defining queries.
• Article schema with author, datePublished, dateModified.

For Claude

Brave-grounded means publication mentions matter most. Coordinated brand mentions on niche-relevant publications outperform on-page tweaks.

Common GEO mistakes

• Optimising one engine at a time. Win across all 5 simultaneously — each requires different signals.
• Treating GEO as content writing. 60% of the work is structural and entity-level, not editorial.
• Skipping measurement. Without weekly tracking, you''re guessing — and AI engines drift fast.