# I tried "GEO" on my indie tool — it was just SEO (here's the GSC data) > Source: > Published: 2026-06-14 23:34:48+00:00 Every other newsletter this year told me my SaaS needed **GEO** — Generative Engine Optimization. Write an `llms.txt` . Add "AI-only" schema. Chunk your content for the models. So before sinking a weekend into it, I read one contrarian source, opened Google Search Console for my tool, and looked at the actual numbers. The verdict was boring and freeing: for Google, optimizing for AI answers is *still just SEO*. The real problem wasn't my markup — it was that almost nothing about my site was discoverable in the first place. Here's the data, the three fixes that mattered, and the two places I face-planted. I'm building [Mimi Seed](https://mimi-seed.pryzm.gg), an open-source MCP server that lets indie devs drive Play Store / App Store / Firebase releases from inside Claude Code or Codex. Classic indie-hacker situation: tiny audience, and a constant temptation to chase the shiny new growth lever. The single most useful thing I read was a curated list ([ awesome-geo](https://github.com/aldegad/awesome-geo)) whose thesis is blunt: `llms.txt` is a community proposal. Google doesn't support it and has no plans to. Treating it as mandatory is hype.That last bullet turned out to be the whole game. But I didn't take their word for it — I went to the data. My landing page lives on a subdomain. I didn't even have a dedicated Search Console property for it — it was rolled up under the parent domain property. So I queried the parent property and filtered to just my pages. Ninety days: `libraries.io` , an npm mirror. My entire backlink profile was an auto-generated package page.This reframed everything. My problem was never snippet wording or AI-readability. You can't optimize the click-through rate of a result nobody sees. The bottleneck was **impressions** — being found at all — and the lever for that, per the data and the contrarian list, is *external citations*, not markup. And one more thing I'd half-ignored: my sitemap had **never been submitted** to Search Console. It existed at `/sitemap.xml` , generated by the framework, registered nowhere. No `llms.txt` . No secret AI schema. Just hygiene: **1. A real entity graph.** My JSON-LD was a lone `SoftwareApplication` object. I replaced it with a proper `@graph` tying together `Organization` + `WebSite` + `SoftwareApplication` , and — the part that matters for both SEO and "GEO" — a `sameAs` array linking the GitHub repo and both npm packages. ``` { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "Organization", "@id": "https://example.com/#organization", "name": "Mimi Seed", "sameAs": [ "https://github.com/jeonghwanko/mimi-seed-sdk", "https://www.npmjs.com/package/mimi-seed", "https://www.npmjs.com/package/@yoonion/mimi-seed-mcp" ] }, { "@type": "WebSite", "publisher": { "@id": "https://example.com/#organization" } }, { "@type": "SoftwareApplication", "publisher": { "@id": "https://example.com/#organization" } } ] } ``` `sameAs` is the literal mechanism for telling a search/answer engine "the website, the GitHub org, and the npm packages are all the same entity." For a project that recently went through a rename, consolidating that identity is the highest-leverage markup change you can make. **2. A sitemap that isn't lying.** My generated sitemap listed anchor URLs — `/#install` , `/#features` , `/#cli` . Here's the detail no tutorial mentions: **Google strips the fragment.** Every one of those collapses to the same canonical `/` . They add zero index coverage and just noise. Worse, the sitemap also listed `/tool` — which my `robots.txt` *disallowed*. That's a self-inflicted "Submitted URL blocked by robots.txt" warning. My landing is a single-page app, so the honest sitemap is exactly one URL. I trimmed it to that, then submitted it. Google fetched it within seconds: 0 errors, **1 URL** — which is the fragment-dedup behavior proving itself. **3. A dedicated property.** I added a URL-prefix property for the subdomain so its impressions/positions stop being averaged in with unrelated sites. Pure reporting hygiene, but you can't improve what you can't see cleanly. Two pitfalls ate more time than the actual SEO work. **Next.js caches your public/ file list.** Google's verification needed `google.html` served at the site root. I dropped it into `public/` on the live box and curled it — `/icons/...png` ) returned 200. The running server had snapshotted the set of public files at build/boot and never rescanned. A graceful reload fixed it (the file was on disk the whole time). If you ever hot-patch a static file into a running Node server and it 404s while its neighbors don't, that's your clue — restart, don't debug the path.**Your API's Google identity ≠ your browser's.** I tried to submit the sitemap programmatically and got a flat `403: insufficient permission` for the new property — even though I'd just verified it in the browser. The catch: the automation authenticates as one Google account; my browser session was a *different* account. The property was owned by the browser identity, invisible to the API identity. Once I re-verified it under the same account that owned the parent domain property (the one the automation actually uses), the submit went through instantly. Verification is per-identity, and "I'm logged in as me" in two places doesn't mean it's the *same* me. I fixed the hygiene. I did **not** fix the actual bottleneck. My backlink profile is still one auto-generated npm mirror. The entity graph helps an engine *understand* my project once it finds it — but the data is unambiguous that the gating factor is being *found*, and that's a function of external citations I don't have yet. Markup was the easy 20%. The hard 80% — getting real, trustworthy sources to mention the project — is exactly the work that doesn't fit in a JSON-LD block. So this post is also me doing something about that. Which is very on-brand for the conclusion. The contrarian source was *more* actionable than any "47 GEO tactics" listicle, precisely because it told me what **not** to do. Skipping `llms.txt` and AI-schema cargo-culting saved the weekend I'd budgeted for them, and the data said that weekend would've moved nothing. If you've shipped a small tool or SaaS: did "GEO" ever do anything measurable for you that plain SEO + getting cited didn't? Or is it, as far as the data goes, just SEO with a markup tax and better marketing? I'd genuinely like to be wrong here — tell me what you've measured.