Most "GEO tips" lists start with tactics. This one starts with the question that makes every other question meaningful: do you actually have a problem?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) content tends to jump straight to tactics — add schema, publish an FAQ, get quoted somewhere. Those aren't wrong, but they're step four or five, not step one. If you do them without first knowing whether your brand shows up in AI answers at all, you're optimizing blind. Here's the order that actually makes sense, roughly by priority.
Before changing anything, find out where you stand today. Ask an AI assistant the kind of question a real buyer would ask about your category — without mentioning your brand name — and see what comes back. Do this a handful of times, because answers vary run to run. This is exactly what Mentioned automates: it asks Claude 5 realistic buyer questions about your category and reports, honestly, whether your brand comes up and who gets recommended instead. Skipping this step means every later change is a guess about whether it worked.
Search for your brand name plus your category. Is there a page, anywhere, that plainly states what you are, what you do, and who you're for — in your own words, not just implied by a logo and a tagline? If the only place that connects "your brand" to "your category" is your own homepage's hero copy, that's thin signal for anything reading the web at scale, human or machine.
Independent mentions — reviews, comparison articles, directory listings, press, forum threads, "best of" roundups you didn't write — matter because they're evidence other than your own marketing that you exist and do the thing you claim to do. This doesn't mean chasing backlinks for their own sake; it means noticing whether anyone besides you has ever described your product in writing, anywhere.
A basic technical pass: is your robots.txt blocking crawlers it shouldn't? Does your core content render without requiring JavaScript execution a crawler might not run? Is your site fast enough and stable enough not to time out? This is unglamorous and it's also the difference between "invisible because nobody's looking" and "invisible because nothing's actually there for them to read." It's a precondition, not a strategy.
Once the above is in place, schema.org markup (Organization, Product, FAQPage, etc.) is worth adding — it makes what you already have unambiguous to machines. But the evidence so far, including Ahrefs' large-scale test tracking 1,885 pages that added it, shows it doesn't move AI citations on its own. Treat it as a small, cheap reinforcement of real substance, not a substitute for it.
AI answers aren't static — models get updated, and the same question can return a different answer on different days even without any model change. Checking once a quarter, or after a meaningful change to your public presence, is more useful than checking daily and reacting to noise.
It isn't a guarantee. Nobody outside the model providers can tell you with certainty why a specific brand did or didn't get mentioned in a specific answer — see how AI assistants actually choose brands for the honest version of that. This checklist is the set of things that are within your control and grounded in how these systems plausibly work, ordered by how much they matter, starting with the one step most guides skip: finding out if you even have a problem before you spend time solving one.