An assistant cites you when three things are true at once: it can reach your pages, one of your pages answers the question completely in a passage it can lift without editing, and your brand is already named on the third party sources it pulls alongside you. Miss any one of the three and you are invisible inside the answer no matter where you rank underneath it.
That is the whole mechanism. The rest of this is how to check each of the three on your own site, in the order that finds problems fastest.
First, can the assistants reach you at all?
Open your own robots.txt and read it. The crawlers that feed the assistants have their own names, and a blanket rule written years ago for scrapers now blocks the thing you are trying to win. The ones worth checking by name are GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, ClaudeBot for Claude, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended for Gemini and the AI features in Google, and CCBot for the Common Crawl that several models were trained on.
Blocking them is a legitimate choice. Blocking them by accident, while paying somebody to get you cited, is the version worth catching this afternoon. Copilot is the easiest one to verify either way, because it cites from the Bing index, and Bing Webmaster Tools is free.
A brand that cannot be crawled cannot be quoted. It is the cheapest check on the list and the one nobody runs.
Second, is there a passage worth lifting?
Assistants answer in paragraphs, so they reach for pages written in paragraphs that stand up on their own. A page that buries the answer under four hundred words of preamble, or splits it across a heading, a bullet list and a table, gives the model nothing it can quote without rewriting, and a model that has to rewrite you usually cites somebody it did not have to.
The shape that gets quoted is boring and specific. A question as the heading, the answer in the first sentence under it, and the reasoning after that. One idea per heading. Numbers with their source named in the same sentence. No claim that depends on a paragraph three screens further up.
Third, who else says your name?
This is the part most GEO pitches leave out, because it is not work you can do inside a CMS. Assistants assemble an answer from several sources at once, and the sources they trust for a recommendation are rarely the brand being recommended. Buying guides, review platforms, forums and trade press carry more weight in that assembly than your own about page ever will.
So the honest version of this work is half writing and half placement. Getting into the comparison articles that already rank for your category does more for your citation rate than another page on your own domain, and it is slower, and anybody selling you GEO without mentioning it is selling you ordinary SEO with a new invoice, which is written up separately.
What it looked like when we did it
Phrase Studios is our own streetwear label, so nothing about it is second hand. We rewrote the pages that already existed before writing a single new one, published a Journal on top of them, and added an llms.txt so the crawlers get a clean read. Across July and August, citations in Copilot went from 219 to 8 257, and impressions inside AI features went from 290 to 23 503.
The store was small when we started, which flatters every multiple on that page, and we say so on it. The full case study has the Search Console exports underneath the numbers rather than a screenshot of a summary.
How you know it is working before the traffic moves
Citations move before sessions do, so measure the citations. Bing Webmaster Tools shows you the Copilot side for nothing. Search Console has an AI mode filter on the performance report. Beyond that, ask the assistants the ten questions a customer would actually type and write down who gets named, once a month, in the same document. It is manual and it is the only read that tells you whether the work is landing.
What we do with it
We audit the crawl access first because it is free, then the pages against the passage test, then we go and find the third party surfaces where your category is already being decided. What we would change is written down before anything is signed. How we run the channel week to week is on the SEO and GEO page.