How to “Do” GEO Optimization in 6 Stages Across Your Locations

If you’re a CMO or executive of an enterprise brand, you’ve probably felt the insecurity: AI search is influencing customer purchasing decisions — but you don’t yet fully understand how to influence AI’s recommendations — or how to track them for that matter.

One common “objection” is that brand recommendations in AI feel inconsistent, and it’s hard to know if your brand is actually being regularly mentioned or cited — or if your competitors are winning instead. 

What is playing in the back of your mind is that some brands have already claimed success through Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) in this new search era … you’re just not 100% sure how they got there.

Built for multi-location brands, GEO Studio transforms the murkiness of AI visibility into actionable business intelligence. This AI Search Maturity Model, discussed in our webinar with AthenaHQ, gives your team a clear framework for turning insights from GEO Studio into impact — and how to break it down into 6 stages over the coming weeks.

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Set Your Opportunities and Goals 

When: Weeks 1–4

Start by aligning stakeholders across marketing, ops, and local teams on the business problem. What exactly do you want to achieve across your locations — customer awareness, conversion, brand authority (or all of the above)? 

Establish clear KPIs upfront. For multi-location brands, this will typically include:

• Mention Rate: How often your brand appears in AI-generated answers
• Citation Rate: How frequently AI systems reference your content as a trusted source
• Share of Voice: Your brand's presence compared to local competitors

These GEO metrics provide the foundation for tracking progress and demonstrating ROI to leadership.

Once you’ve clarified and defined these, prioritize the most promising AI prompt opportunities across your locations. These are the prompts with the highest volume and value in your Prompt Center and could therefore have the greatest impact if you’re surfaced correctly and consistently.

This early clarification helps your teams focus on what matters most for the business and prevents wasted effort focusing on low-impact opportunities. From this step on, every action you take with GEO Studio — from content creation or optimization to monitoring AI visibility — has purpose and measurable impact.

2. Audit Your Performance and Benchmarks 

When: Weeks 4–6

Next, and before you succumb to the pressure of publishing more and more content in hopes of greater search performance, audit your current performance. 

What content is showing up in AI responses? Which of your locations is showing up? Which AI models are recommending you? 

Use GEO Studio’s Olympus to capture citations, mentions, benchmarks, and opportunities so you know your starting point. This step turns that initial uncertainty into a solid understanding and self-awareness from which you can build positively.

This stage includes identifying content that’s thin, outdated, or not structured in a way that AI systems can easily surface. 

You’ll understand better what you need to do to outperform your competitors for the prompts that move the needle, which is critical for the strategy SEOs and CMOs build with their teams.

3. Build Your Content Strategy 

When: Weeks 6–8

This is where your multi-location content moves from generic to strategic. Where it’s aligned to be picked up by consumers and AI systems. 

Which pieces of content address specific prompts your potential customers are actually asking?  Which prompts represent the highest commercial intent? Where are the gaps that leave your brand unmentionable or uncitable in AI responses?

The query fan-out feature in GEO Studio helps you expand coverage intelligently, inspiring greater content depth so you maximize your AI visibility and cover specific questions your customers are asking. 

Creating this content with precision and focus is how local businesses will thrive in AI search. On top of that, your content must be built to be discovered, understood, and trusted by AI systems. And if you were doing that for traditional SEO, like a good responsible search marketer, your content strategy really won’t change too much.

4. Take Action

When: Weeks 8–12

Now the plan leaves the group chat, figuratively, of course.

GEO Studio’s Action Center helps your teams move from strategy to implementation efficiently and systematically, by creating new content to fill gaps you identified or updating existing content that is optimized for every search journey. 

5. Measure Your Moves

When: Weeks 12–16

With GEO Studio, you can monitor your locations’ Mention Rate, Citation Rate, and Share of Voice across AI platforms. You can analyze what’s working, iterate through testing, and optimize continuously. Performance will fluctuate, just as it always has in SEO, which is why tracking over time matters most.

Come back to the goals you set at stage one and gauge how far you’ve come after a few months. 

You can also check your sentiment and positioning: How is your brand described when mentioned? Are you positioned as premium, affordable, family-friendly, innovative? How your brand or location is described in AI responses shape perception before customers ever visit.

With this follow-up audit, execs and marketers can build confidence that every dollar invested in AI visibility drives measurable results.

6. Learn and Scale (16+ Weeks)

When: Weeks 16+

Use the insights from the past 16 weeks to:

• Identify what's working: Which content types, structures, or topics consistently earn citations and mentions? Replicate success.
• Spot underperformance: Where are gaps widening? Which locations lag behind? Why?
• Run controlled tests: Test different content approaches, formats, or messaging to see what AI systems prefer.
• Adjust strategy in real time: AI search evolves quickly. Regular monitoring lets you adapt before visibility fizzles out.

Expand into new journeys, channels, markets, or capabilities, using a repeatable workflow that keeps your multi-location brand ahead of the competition.

Maximize Your AI Maturity Faster Than Competitors

Success in AI search isn't a one-time achievement. The brands that have already seen early success have demonstrated continuous learning, iteration, and measurement.

Without actionable data, it’s easy to guess — and assume your authority. GEO Studio equips multi-location brands with the visibility, insight, and control they need to confidently understand AI-driven customer decisions and turn that understanding into local performance gains.

The brands that are already winning aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They have the clearest strategy, the strongest actionable data, and the fastest learning cycles on how to “do” GEO optimization.