What you can and can’t control as a website owner

Why this lesson exists

GEO is a new field, and new fields attract a lot of confident advice. Some of it is genuinely useful. Some of it overpromises. And some of it is selling tactics for things you can’t actually control — which wastes your time and erodes your trust in the parts that work.

So before we get into anything tactical, it’s worth being clear about what you, as a website owner, can actually influence. The honest answer involves three categories.

What’s fully in your control

These are the things you decide, and they’re where almost all of your GEO effort should go.

The content on your site. What you publish, how it’s written, how clearly it answers real questions, how trustworthy it sounds. This is the single biggest lever you have.

How your site is structured. Headings, URLs, internal links, navigation. Whether your site is easy for any system — human or AI — to read and understand.

Your structured data and metadata. Schema markup, meta descriptions, page titles, alt text. The information about your information.

The signals that build trust. Your author bio, your team page, links to credible sources, citations of your expertise. The things that help any reader, including an AI, decide whether to take you seriously.

Your technical foundations. Site speed, mobile-friendliness, accessible markup, working links. These have always mattered for SEO. They still do.

If you do these things well, you’ve done your share of the work. Everything else is downstream.

What’s partially in your control

These are areas where you can influence the outcome, but you don’t decide it.

Whether AI systems cite you. You can make your content easier to cite — clear, well-structured, trustworthy — but you can’t guarantee a citation. AI systems decide who to mention based on factors that aren’t fully transparent, and they change frequently.

How your business is described by AI. You can publish clear information about who you are, what you do, and who you serve. Whether AI systems pick that up accurately depends partly on what else has been written about you across the web.

Whether AI training data includes your content. Some AI systems train on publicly available web content, some don’t. Some honour the directives you set in robots.txt, some don’t. You have some control here, but it’s incomplete — and we’ll cover this in detail in Module 6.

How visible you are inside AI answers. Even with everything done well, your content might appear in some answers and not others, on some platforms and not others. There’s no single ranking position to optimise for.

The honest framing here: you can stack the deck. You can’t deal the cards.

What’s outside your control

These are the things people will sometimes try to sell you a solution for. There isn’t one.

Which AI systems exist. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok — and the ones that haven’t been built yet. You can’t influence which platforms your customers use to find answers.

How those systems work internally. The algorithms, the training methods, the citation logic. These are decided by AI companies and change without notice.

Whether AI traffic patterns continue. Maybe in five years everyone goes back to typing into Google. Maybe AI tools take over more of the web. Nobody knows. You can prepare for the trend without betting your entire strategy on it.

Whether a specific competitor gets cited instead of you. AI systems make choices that aren’t always fair, predictable, or reproducible. Sometimes you’ll be cited; sometimes a competitor will. You can do everything right and still not win every citation.

Recognising this category matters because it stops you wasting energy on the wrong things — and helps you spot bad advice from people promising results they can’t deliver.

Where to focus

If you take one thing from this lesson: spend almost all of your time on the first category.

The website owners who get the most from GEO over the next few years won’t be the ones chasing tactics in the third category. They’ll be the ones doing the boring, durable work in the first one — clearer content, better structure, stronger trust signals, accurate metadata. The work that would benefit any reader.

That’s the work the rest of this course covers.

A useful mindset

You can’t make an AI cite you. You can make yourself the kind of site it would be silly not to.

The goal isn’t to game any specific system. It’s to be unmistakably worth citing, on as many topics as your business reasonably covers.

Coming up in the next module: How AI systems actually read the web. We’ll look at how AI systems gather information about your site — crawling, training, retrieval, and why understanding the difference between these is the foundation of every GEO decision you’ll make.