GEO Video Best Practices: How to Get Your Video Cited by AI

Free download: Get the GEO Video Checklist, the 19 checks I use to make a video easy for AI search to find and cite.

Key Takeaways

• The best practices for optimizing video for generative engines revolve around high information density and front-loading your answers.
• AI crawlers look for exact facts, not long hooks. State the definitive answer in the first 15 seconds.
• Speak in clear bullet points for easy extraction, and explicitly define your key terms.
• Mine buyer questions from your sales transcripts and answer them in the buyer's own words.
• Post on YouTube with chapters, then embed on your site with schema and the transcript. You get data within a day or two.

This fits inside a bigger picture. If you want the full view first, here's the bigger picture.

What are the best practices for optimizing video for generative engines?

The best practices for optimizing video for generative engines revolve around high information density and front-loading your answers. AI crawlers look for exact facts, not long hooks.

To get your video cited by AI, you need to do three things:

1. State the definitive answer in the first 15 seconds.
2. Speak in clear bullet points for easy extraction.
3. Explicitly define your key terms.

GEO stands for generative engine optimization. It means building your content so AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude can find it and use it when buyers ask their questions.

Those three things are the core. The rest of this page is the full process around them, step by step.

Step 1: Why start with goals?

We start with goals. Without a goal in mind, you won't know whether you're successful.

Step 2: Where do you find the buyer questions?

Since we're answering buyer questions with GEO best practices, the Intel phase is about finding out what questions buyers are asking. You're going to find these in your sales transcripts and chats. You could also find them on places like Quora or Reddit. You may even know 80% of the questions that get asked all the time.

Step 3: How do you audit where you stand in AI search?

Next, do an audit. For which of these questions do you already have video content that answers them directly? Are those videos showing up in AI searches?

You can look on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and any other LLMs you like, and see if you are showing up. You can test daily or weekly, but with some frequency, so you know whether you are part of that buyer journey.

If you're not showing up in AI search results, that means things are getting summarized, or someone else is showing up. This is all about you showing up in their buyer journey with your video content. That way you can build trust and help educate them 80% of the way through their buyer journey, until they're willing to talk to a salesperson.

Step 4: What is possible, and what is realistic?

Once you know where you stand, look at what's possible. How many of these questions can you answer with videos? What's your staff availability? Who can you put on camera? What budget do you have?

That brings you to the realistic phase. There's the possible, and then there's the realistic. After you've weighed what's realistic for you, you make some decisions and approve a plan. Then you go to build mode.

Step 5: How do you build video answers to buyer questions?

Mine the answers directly from the buyer questions in those transcripts, using their own words. That's very important, because it's going to resonate with them. You don't want to use the language you use internally. You want to use the language they're searching for.

Front-load the answers. Then go deep enough to move buyers to the next phase in their journey, where they're asking a different question because you've already sufficiently answered this one. That is the goal.

Step 6: Why post on YouTube, and how do you make it crawlable?

Post the videos on YouTube as the main driver. YouTube has a financial incentive to surface videos in Google search results, and people like to watch videos because they're helpful for educating people in their buyer journey.

Then post in a way that can be crawled by AI crawlers:

• Embed the videos with transcripts.
• Use chapter markers on YouTube.
• Use thumbnails and titles that resonate with the buyer questions.
• Embed the YouTube videos on your site with schema.
• Include the transcript and a written answer that fully answers the question, to move buyers on just like the video does.

Step 7: What does the data tell you?

After you post, you get data pretty quick, within a day or two. You'll know if people are watching.

If there are no clicks, something doesn't resonate. It's probably the thumbnail or the title. Or maybe you haven't optimized it correctly with schema, so it's not even showing up as they're searching.

"We got to show up and we got to earn the click and then after they click, we got to earn the viewership." Dane Frederiksen

You have to keep viewers past the first 30 seconds to make sure you answered their question, and then explain deeply.

Step 8: When should you revise a video?

If they're not clicking, or they're not staying, you need to do some revisions. Go back and say: we have not answered these questions sufficiently. Maybe you do another version with a better answer. Or maybe there's a better priority question to go after.

If you've answered the top-of-funnel questions well and people are completing those videos, make the next videos that move them closer to the sale.

Step 9: What is content bingo?

Ideally, you approach an end state I like to call content bingo. You've created enough video content to answer most of their questions, maybe 80% of them. Buyers have moved down the funnel to the point where they have very specific questions about their unique situation, their company, their niche.

That last 20% is when they're willing to talk to a salesperson, or maybe start a sales chat.

Step 10: How does this become a flywheel?

Once you get to build mode, this becomes a flywheel. You get more and more data about who's watching, what questions are answered, and what you need to do better.

You spend the time making the video one time. Every time someone watches it, that's time saved for you. Say you spend one hour making the video. If five people watch it, that's time you didn't have to spend educating them in the sales process.

And because of low trust, buyers don't want to talk to you early anyway. That means somebody is out there educating them. It's either AI Overviews or someone else's content, some influencer or your competitor. We don't want that. We want them spending that time with us, building trust.

This is a long buying cycle. Buyers have a lot of questions that need answering, so they need to spend time with content that answers them. You want to be the one showing up there, not somebody else.

"YouTube is going to be your best friend to build a compounding inbound sales machine." Dane Frederiksen

Get the free GEO Video Checklist

I put the best practices into a free checklist you can hand to your team. Download the GEO Video Checklist here. If you need help with any part of this, just reach out. I'm happy to answer questions.

Doing the thing is the easy part. The hard part is knowing where you're already winning and where you're invisible. That's exactly what our free AI Visibility Snapshot shows you, before you spend a dollar.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best practices for optimizing video for generative engines?

They revolve around high information density and front-loading your answers. AI crawlers look for exact facts, not long hooks. State the definitive answer in the first 15 seconds, speak in clear bullet points for easy extraction, and explicitly define your key terms.

Where do you find the buyer questions to answer on video?

In your sales transcripts and chats. You can also find them on places like Quora or Reddit. You may already know 80% of the questions that get asked all the time.

How do you check if your videos show up in AI search?

Ask the buyer questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and any other LLMs you like, and see if you show up. Test daily or weekly, but with some frequency, so you know whether you are part of the buyer journey.

How should you post a video so AI crawlers can read it?

Post it on YouTube with chapter markers and a thumbnail and title that match the buyer question. Then embed the YouTube video on your site with schema, the transcript, and a written answer that fully answers the question.

How fast will you know if a video is working?

Pretty quick, within a day or two. You will know if people are watching. If there are no clicks, it is probably the thumbnail or the title, or the video has not been optimized correctly so it is not showing up.

Full Transcript

The best practices for optimizing video for generative engines revolve around high information density and front loading your answers. AI crawlers look for exact facts, not long hooks. To get your video cited by AI, you need to do three things. Number one, state the definitive answer in the first 15 seconds. Number two, speak in clear bullet points for easy extraction. Number three, explicitly define your key terms.

I have a free GEO video checklist for you to download the description below. Now let's break down each step. So we're going to start over here with our goals. The reason we do that is because without having a goal in mind, you won't know whether you're successful. Then, since we're answering buyer questions with GEO best practices, we're going to identify in the Intel phase what are the buyer questions that they're asking? Now you're going to find these in your sales transcripts, chats.

You could also find them on places like Quora or Reddit. You may even know 80% of the questions that get asked all the time. So then we're going to do an audit and see, okay, which of these questions do we already have some video content that's answering these questions directly? Are they showing up in AI searches? So you can look on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, any other LLMs you like, and you can see, are you showing up? You can test daily, weekly, but with some frequency, you'll know whether or not you're part of that buyer journey.

Because if you're not showing up in AI search results, that means things are getting summarized or someone else is showing up. And so this is all about you showing up in their buyer journey with your video content. So you can build trust and so you can help educate them, you know, 80% of the way down their buyer funnel through their buyer journey until they're willing to talk to a salesperson. So that's what this is all about. So once we know where we stand, then we can start to look and see, okay, what's possible here? How many of these questions can we answer with videos?

What's our staff availability? Who can we put on camera? What kind of money or budget or, you know, like all the things you're going to need to pull together for this? What can you actually pull off? So that kind of brings us to the realistic phase. So there's the possible and then there's the realistic.

So these are kind of part of the same thing. And then you get to the point after you've weighed what's realistic for you, you can make some decisions about, okay, now we know what we're going to do. We've approved a plan and so then we go to the build mode. So the way that we're going to build our video answers to buyer questions is we're going to mine those directly from your buyer questions in those transcripts, right? Using their own words, that's very important because that's going to resonate with them and you don't want to use your language that, you know, the way you talk about that internally. You want to use the language that they're searching for.

So you can have answers that answer those directly according to this formula here. So you're front loading those answers and then you're going deep enough in your answers to move them to the next phase in their journey where they're asking a different question because you've already sufficiently answered this one. That is the goal. So according to that formula, we're going to build the videos so that it's answering their questions and then we're going to post those on YouTube as the main driver because YouTube has a financial incentive to surface those in Google search results and people like to watch videos because they're very helpful for educating people in their buyer journey, right? So because they want to watch them, YouTube wants to show them and we want to be a part of that journey. So we're going to post those in a way that they can be crawled by AI crawlers.

We're going to embed these videos with transcripts. We're going to use chapter markers on YouTube. We're going to also include thumbnails and titles that are going to resonate with the buyer questions so that they're not lost. We're going to embed these YouTube videos on your site with schema and we're going to include the transcript and decent answers that fully answered their question to move them on just like the video does. So after we post that stuff, pretty quick, we're going to start to get some data like within a day or two. You'll know if people are watching.

If there's no clicks, then something doesn't resonate. It's probably the thumbnail or the title if they're not even clicking. Maybe you haven't optimized it correctly with schema or something like that. So it's not even showing up as they're searching. So we got to show up and we got to earn the click and then after they click, we got to earn the viewership. We got to keep them past the first 30 seconds to make sure that we answered their question and then we got to explain deeply.

And if we're doing a good job of this, we want them to stay to like 70% of the way there and then YouTube will then promote that I think three times as much. And it makes sense because if that's the case, they're watching most of it, it's really helpful content. And so from the nature of the content, the transcripts and all that, YouTube knows who this is going to resonate with. And if you're answering, well, they're going to keep sending that out to more and more people. Now, if these things are not happening in your analysis here, they're not clicking, they're not staying, something like that. We need to do some revisions.

We need to go back and say, all right, we have not answered these questions sufficiently. So maybe we want to do another version of that. The answer is better. Or maybe there's a better priority question that we can go after. If we've answered sufficiently and we have kind of checked off those top of funnel questions that get them into our, into our visibility and trust funnel. Then if they're watching those and we'll know that they're completing, we can make the next videos that's going to move them closer to the sale.

And then ideally, we're approaching a in-state where we have what I like to call content bingo. We've basically created enough video content that answers most of their questions, maybe 80% of their questions. And we've moved them all the way down to the funnel to that 80% place where they're like, okay, now I have some very specific questions to my unique situation, my company, my niche, whatever that is. And then that lasts 20%. That's when they're willing to talk to a salesperson or maybe get a sales chat or something like that. So this is the whole process.

And once we get over to the build mode, this really becomes a flywheel and some beautiful things start happening. You're going to get more and more data about who's watching, what questions are answered, and then what you need to do better. And then the video that you put out there, you spend the time making the video one time and then you put it out there. And every time someone watches that, that's time saved for you because let's say you spend one hour making this video. Well, if you get five people watching that one hour, that's one hour you didn't have to spend educating them in the sales process. And because of low trust, they're not going to want to talk to you anyway.

So that means that somebody is out there educating them. It's either AI Overviews or it's someone else's content, some influencer or your competitor, something like that. And we don't want that. We want them to spend a lot of time with us building trust. And the magic number I think you may have heard of this is like the 7-4-11 rule from Google, which means you need to spend seven hours with your content over four different platforms with 11 different touch points. And even if those numbers aren't the right numbers exactly, I think the idea is still very understandable.

This is a long buying cycle. They have a lot of questions that need answering. So they need to spend time answering those questions. And so you want to be the one that's showing up here, not somebody else. And that's why YouTube is going to be your best friend to build a compounding inbound sales machine, which is going to be optimized for GEO best practices. And it's going to function as a flywheel to get better and better at selling for you.

24-7 with the content that's out there compounding. So if you want to get the free GEO best practices checklist, I'll put the link down there in the description that's free, my gift to you. And if you need any help with any part of this, just reach out. I'm happy to answer any questions or give you a hand if that's what you need. Okay. Good luck.

Most teams don't get this right on the first try. Here's how we approached it for a real team. Curious what it'd look like for you? Let's talk it through.