Niclas Cullberg is a seasoned strategist and consultant at Vaimo with deep experience across digital transformation, customer experience, and marketing services. At Vaimo, he operates as a “Swiss Army knife,” equally at home speaking with IT departments, CMOs, or C-suite stakeholders. Passionate about relevance, content, and customer journeys, Niclas is also a prolific LinkedIn author and speaker on the evolving role of generative AI in commerce.
We recently hosted a masterclass about GEO and AI search, and how to become the brand that AI recommends. Our attendees had a bunch of great questions, and Niclas was more than happy to answer them.
Watch the recording of our webinar for free, and keep reading to find out what our audience wanted to know.
Niclas Cullberg
Strategy Consultant, Nordics
Vaimo
“Do you have any recommendations for video content? Is this also content that large language models take into account?”
At Vaimo, we’ve found that video can play a pivotal role in elevating your site’s GEO and SEO performance. When developing product walkthroughs, explainer videos, or testimonials, always include detailed transcripts and closed captions. But it doesn’t stop there: mark up each video with VideoObject schema to signal its presence and context to search engines and large language models (LLMs).
This approach ensures not just visibility in classical SEO, but discoverability in AI-generated results; LLMs increasingly leverage indexed transcripts and the metadata behind your visual assets to provide users with authoritative answers.
“How has the role of websites changed in an AI-first world?”
Websites have evolved into dual-purpose platforms serving both human and artificial intelligence needs. Websites remain central for human validation, brand experience, and complex actions— people still turn to them for authentic brand interactions, detailed exploration, and completing sophisticated tasks that require decision-making and trust.
However, for AI agents, they act as structured content sources that crawl, parse, and understand web content to answer queries and make recommendations. Catering to both the human experience and AI agents requires a balanced approach.
“If you are about to build a new website, what would you do differently compared to the pre-AI era?”
If you’re preparing to build a new site, the priorities have evolved. Today, an AI-first architecture means designing for speed, mobile excellence, and robust server-side rendering. This guarantees accessibility for both traditional crawlers and new AI bots. Vaimo recommends maintaining a streamlined, semantic site structure and proactively configuring robots.txt to unambiguously welcome AI engines (such as GPTBot or PerplexityBot).
Layer your content with rich schema, covering FAQs, Products, and Organisation data, and consider implementing llms.txt files. This technical groundwork sets your brand up for future digital discovery by both people and generative machines.
“What does ‘technical site structure optimization for AI’ mean?”
Optimizing technical structure for AI means far more than ticking basic SEO boxes. Vaimo’s approach emphasizes server-side rendering over JavaScript-heavy, client-rendered pages: fast load, full visibility. Add schema markup to every key site asset, like products, FAQs, reviews, to contextually empower engine and LLM understanding.
Use canonical tags to avoid duplication issues, and configure robots.txt and llms.txt so cutting-edge crawlers index the right content. These actions directly impact how search and generative AI engines surface your brand.
“As AI overviews and LLMs constantly change, how would you audit your brand narrative in LLMs and AI overviews? And how would you actively steer LLMs and AI towards a brand narrative closer to your desired brand image and tone of voice?”
To understand how your brand appears in AI overviews and LLM answers, start with active monitoring. Vaimo recommends using dedicated tools which track citations, sentiment, and narrative accuracy across platforms like Google, Perplexity, and ChatGPT. Shape your narrative by publishing original FAQs, authoritative reviews, and customer-centric content.
Foster frequent citation by trusted third-party sources and continually refresh your core brand messaging. Your public persona, including latent content like forums and Q&A, needs to reflect your desired tone and image. This is an ongoing process; using monitoring and measurement tools helps you adapt as the AI landscape changes.
“When we know that ChatGTP is hooked up on Bing, is now a good time to talk to our clients about pivoting to more advertising on Bing?”
Will paid advertising on Bing actually help pages rank better in its search engine? Just because AI platforms use Bing doesn’t mean real users will. Paid advertising on Bing alone won’t improve rankings; focusing on organic optimization is more impactful.
“What’s the best measuring tool for GEO? What should I look for in a measurement tool?”
GEO performance demands purpose-built measurement. Some tools stand out for citation and narrative tracking, others offer multi-engine monitoring to analyze brand mentions and answer accuracy. Key metrics include: citation frequency, presence in AI answers, narrative sentiment, and the impact on conversion rates. With the right toolset, Vaimo guides clients from visibility diagnostics to actionable growth.
Focus on tracking where AI-driven traffic is directed and pay special attention to the content on those pages. This can serve as a strong indicator of what type of content “works” for LLMs in a given industry. In practice, this means monitoring landing pages coming from LLMs and analyzing their impact.
Overall, the sentiment is that we’ll need a variety of tools for different purposes — and that’s completely fine. One best practice to consider is creating a single source of truth that consolidates data from all these tools.
“What type of content is most effective?”
Intent-driven FAQs, expert guides, and authentic user reviews are highly effective in the new era of GEO. Structured content such as lists, tables, and well-captioned videos consistently rank for both SEO and AI engines. At Vaimo, we focus on depth and structure, ensuring every piece is schema-marked, authoritative, and experience-rich, so it drives engagement across AI-generated results and traditional search.
“Should one optimize differently for different LLMs?”
Absolutely! Each LLM has its own preferences and data sources. For Google SGE, site authority and comprehensive schema are crucial; Perplexity favors live web retrieval and dynamic FAQs; ChatGPT leans towards trusted, consolidated sources and user experience. Vaimo tailors optimization to the individual engine, staying ahead of technical developments and best practices. Regularly consult engine documentation and review live AI answers to adjust your content and site structure for optimal results.
For technical guidance or a tailored GEO audit, Vaimo’s team is always ready to help clients lead in the evolving AI-powered digital landscape.
Watch the recording of our webinar for free, and keep reading to find out what our audience wanted to know.
