Emilia Möller recently shared something that caught my attention: “You don’t need another SEO vs GEO debate.

You need a strategy that makes you visible.

In AI search, visibility largely depends on 3 things:

→ whether AI can find you,
→ whether it trusts you, and
→ whether it can understand and cite your content.”

That framing is the most useful shortcut I’ve seen for cutting through the noise. Instead of arguing about labels, Emilia points to the real outcome: being present, trusted, and quotable when an AI system answers your customer’s question.

In this post, I’m expanding on Emilia’s 6-pillar checklist with context, examples, and a simple way to turn it into an execution plan for 2026.

Key idea: AI search visibility is not one tactic. It is a system that increases (1) discovery, (2) trust, and (3) citation-readiness.

What “visibility” means in AI search (and why SEO alone is not enough)

Traditional SEO often assumes a clear pathway: Google crawls your pages, ranks them, and users click through. AI search changes the last mile. LLM-based assistants and answer engines might:

Pull a summary without a click
Cite a source selectively (or not at all)
Prefer brands and entities they have seen repeatedly across the web
Blend multiple sources into one response

So if your only KPI is “rank for keyword X,” you can miss the bigger picture: are you being mentioned, recommended, and cited when the question is asked?

Emilia’s checklist works because it maps to the three determinants she named:

Can AI find you? (indexing, mentions, distribution)
Can AI trust you? (entity signals, authority, consistency)
Can AI understand and cite you? (structure, passages, clarity)

Now let’s walk through the six pillars in a blog-friendly, implementable way.

Pillar 1: Brand Presence and Mentions

Emilia put it plainly: “If AI can’t find you, it can’t recommend you.” In practice, many brands are under-invested in “off-site discovery.” They publish great articles, but they are absent from the places models and answer engines repeatedly see brands referenced.

What to do

Check visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and similar tools: search the exact prompts your buyers would use and record whether you appear and how you are described.
Secure mentions in directories and roundups: industry listings, “best tools” pages, partner pages, and community-curated lists.
Build an off-site footprint: PR, podcasts, guest posts, Reddit threads, forums, and niche newsletters.

Example

If you sell compliance software, a single authoritative mention in a well-known compliance directory plus a handful of practitioner discussions on Reddit can do more for “foundness” than another blog post on “what is compliance.” The goal is repeated, consistent references that connect your brand to a category and use case.

Quick test: If you remove your website entirely, would the web still describe what you do, who you serve, and why you matter?

Pillar 2: Entity and Authority Signals

Emilia’s second pillar is about trust: “AI recommends what it trusts.” In the AI era, trust is not just backlinks. It is also entity clarity (who you are), author credibility (who is speaking), and consistency across sources.

What to do

Strengthen entity data where it makes sense: Wikidata entries for notable entities, a complete Google Business Profile, and a consistent presence across major databases (Crunchbase, G2, Capterra, industry associations).
Build author signals: clear author bios, credentials, speaking engagements, and a track record of expertise. If you publish thought leadership, make the author easy to verify.
Publish original data and earn credible backlinks: surveys, benchmarks, case studies, and analyses that others can cite.

Example

A cybersecurity firm can publish an annual “Incident Response Benchmark” with methodology and anonymized insights. That one asset can attract citations, links, podcast invitations, and community discussion, all of which reinforce authority signals.

Pillar 3: Content and Passage Optimization

Emilia’s third point is where many teams can win quickly: “Be easy to extract and quote.” LLMs do not just read pages, they extract passages. If your content buries the answer under a long preamble, you are harder to cite.

What to do

Lead with answers: put the definition, recommendation, or steps near the top.
Use Q&A blocks, lists, and schema: format content so that specific questions map to specific answer blocks.
Keep it clear and current: update dates, remove contradictions, and reduce fluff.

Example structure for a product-led page

One-sentence answer to the core question
A short “when to use this” section
A numbered process
A comparison table
FAQs with direct answers

If a model quoted only one paragraph from your page, would that paragraph still be correct, complete, and useful?

Pillar 4: Conversation and Community Coverage

Emilia noted: “Visibility starts where people talk.” This is easy to underestimate because community content looks messy compared to polished marketing pages. But it is often the most honest dataset about problems, language, and alternatives.

What to do

Identify the real communities: Reddit, Slack groups, Discords, industry forums, and comment sections where practitioners ask for recommendations.
Use real language over keyword stuffing: mirror the phrasing people use, including objections and constraints.
Be consistent: one helpful answer per week beats a burst of activity followed by silence.

Example

If you are in B2B analytics, your buyers might say “We need a single source of truth” or “Our dashboards don’t match.” Those phrases should appear in your content because they reflect user intent, not just search volume.

Pillar 5: Technical Foundations

Emilia’s reminder here is blunt and correct: “If crawlers can’t access you, AI can’t either.” Even the best content strategy fails if your site is difficult to crawl, slow, or structurally confusing.

What to do

Ensure crawler access: robots.txt, noindex rules, canonical tags, and JavaScript rendering should be reviewed.
Improve Core Web Vitals: speed and stability matter for both users and bots.
Keep structure and sitemaps clean: logical internal linking, clear navigation, and accurate XML sitemaps.

Practical tip

Create a “crawlability checklist” for every new section of the site. It is easier than retrofitting fixes after hundreds of pages are published.

Pillar 6: Visibility Tracking and Adaptation

Emilia’s final pillar is the one most teams skip: “You can’t grow what you don’t track.” AI search is evolving quickly, so measurement is not optional.

What to track

Mentions and share of voice across LLMs: for a set of prompts, record which brands are recommended and which sources are cited.
Trend shifts: new competitors appearing, new language emerging, or certain sources being favored.
Competitor learning loops: when a competitor becomes the default answer, inspect their entity footprint, content formatting, and community presence.

A simple measurement cadence

Weekly: run a prompt set (20 to 50 prompts) and log presence, ranking, and citations.
Monthly: review what content got cited and why.
Quarterly: refresh your roadmap based on the patterns.

Treat AI visibility like a product metric: define it, track it, and iterate.

Turning the 6 pillars into a 30-day action plan

To make Emilia’s checklist actionable, I’d sequence it like this:

Week 1: Baseline audit

Run visibility checks in multiple tools
Gather top prompts and record results
Confirm crawlability and indexing basics

Week 2: Fix the “quotability” layer

Update 5 to 10 high-intent pages to lead with answers
Add FAQ sections and relevant schema
Improve internal linking to those pages

Week 3: Build authority and mentions

Pitch 10 targeted directory listings or roundups
Publish one original-data asset or a strong case study
Strengthen author pages and bios

Week 4: Community coverage

Identify 3 communities that influence your buyers
Contribute consistently with helpful, non-salesy answers
Capture language patterns for future content updates

The point is not to do everything at once. It is to build a repeatable system that increases discovery, trust, and citations over time.

Closing thought

Emilia Möller's post is a helpful reset: stop debating SEO vs GEO and focus on visibility mechanics. When you align your brand footprint, entity trust signals, content structure, community presence, technical access, and measurement, you stop guessing and start compounding.

This blog post expands on a viral LinkedIn post by Emilia Möller, AI Growth Strategist | Building the Future of Discoverability. View the original LinkedIn post →