A Practical GEO Checklist: Make Your Site Crawlable and Citable by AI Assistants

The Alibaba.com GEO Research Team published a practical checklist for generative engine optimization (GEO), outlining how to make websites crawlable and citable by AI assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini. The team's monitoring program submits roughly ten thousand prompts to ChatGPT to record citation behavior, emphasizing that AI answers draw from training memory and live citations, with source quality as a shared currency.

Search engine optimization taught us to optimize for crawlers and rankers. Generative engine optimization, or GEO, asks a different question: when an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity answers a user's question, does your page get cited as a source? The term was formalized in a 2023 research paper arXiv:2311.09735 https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735 . The practice has since become urgent: AI search traffic was up 527% year over year as of 2026, and ChatGPT alone serves roughly 700 million weekly active users. Semrush projects AI search traffic may surpass traditional search traffic by 2028. This checklist is adapted from the operating model published on Alibaba.com's GEO Insights channel https://geo.alibaba.com/geo-insights/where-ai-answers-come-from-training-memory-vs-live-citation , where the team runs a recurring monitoring program that submits a fixed panel of roughly ten thousand prompts to ChatGPT and records citation behavior. Every AI answer is assembled from two sources: GEO that works invests in both, on different timelines. Training memory is a long game months to years . Live citation is this week's game. These are the things you can fix today. A page can rank well in classic SEO and still never appear in AI citations if the facts are trapped in images, marketing fluff, or unstructured prose. AI engines extract passages, not pages. AI search engines run their own crawlers or rely on search indices. If your page is not crawlable, it does not exist for live retrieval. robots.txt — make sure content sections are not blocked. <a href links for internal navigation. JavaScript-only routing can create dead ends.Generative engines prefer pages that answer a clear question with clear sections. Reddit and other vote-ranked forums appear both in training data as link filters and in live citations as primary sources . Pages that real communities discuss get cited more. This is the long game. You cannot pay to accelerate it. White papers, systematic buying guides, and category reports behave more like books than like blog spam. Depth beats frequency when the sampling weight is high. Wikipedia, Wikidata, .gov, and academic papers serve as frame builders when the model is uncertain. GEO is not mind-reading. It is deciding where scarce effort compounds inside a known machine — training memory for the long game, live citation for this week's answers, source quality as the shared currency. This article is adapted from the GEO Insights operating model published by the Alibaba.com GEO Research Team. The original includes training-data composition tables, citation family breakdowns, and a full methodology section.