Designing SEO for the AI Era:
Powering 5-Figure Deals
Product Strategy
Enterprise SaaS
Revenue Growth
About
Writesonic is a marketing tech product that helps businesses grow through organic marketing. Before GEO, we were best known for our SEO-ready AI article writer and Chatsonic marketing agents—tools that do all the research using real data pulled from Ahrefs and suggest a plan.
But we noticed something changing.
The way people search is changing. They no longer go to Google first—it's ChatGPT first. Or Perplexity. Or Claude. And if your brand isn't showing up in those AI answers, you're invisible in the new search landscape.
Goal
Create a platform where brands can monitor their AI presence and take action to improve it.
Responsibilities & duration
User research, usability testing, user flows, wireframes, prototyping, and impact tracking.
12 weeks
72% of AI platform users rely on AI as their primary tool for researching products and brands
Adobe, 2025
The Challenge
GEO was a brand new niche, with no playbook and no mental models to borrow from. On top of that, our users were a real mix. Some were entrepreneurs new to marketing, others were advanced marketers who wanted to dig into the data.
The hard part was serving both in one interface. Show too much and a beginner feels lost. Show too little and an expert feels the tool is shallow.
How we overcame it
We went back to basics, user research and first principles. What does each user actually want? A beginner wants to know "how am I doing" at a glance. An expert wants to know exactly why.
So we layered the information instead of flattening it. Every section opens with an overview, a quick snapshot of how you're doing. For anyone who wants to go deeper, the detail is one click away. On the overview table you might see a metric like "answers citing this page," and clicking that number opens the exact list of answers behind it.
The goal was to make information easy to digest, not to hide it.
Our process was messy but quick. We used AI platforms like Claude and V0 to prototype and dive deep into what the future of GEO might look like—not just the current state of competitors, but what a mature enterprise GEO platform could be. Think Ahrefs and Semrush, but for GEO.
Configure your competitors and prompts
Set up what you want to track and who you're competing against.
Track AI visibility and citations
See citations, prompts, and answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.
Sentiment analysis
Get data on how AI is talking about your product - positive, negative, or neutral.
Progressive disclosure
High-level reports for quick insights, with the ability to drill down into responses for deeper analysis.
After Version 1, we waited for feedback from the sales team, customer success, and keeping an eye on the GEO horizon for the latest changes.
The answer was obvious: "I have all these reports. Now what? How can I actually influence my AI visibility? What are the next steps?"
Phase 2
Action centre
We used AI to make it as easy as possible for the end user to take action. The Workflows feature is a testament to that. While other competitors are building complex node-based workflows, we took a chat based approach inspired from tools like Claude Code and Open Claw.
Boost AI Citations
Create new, high-authority articles specifically designed to be "picked up" and cited by LLMs.
External Authority Building
Identify and reach out to relevant blogs or engage in Reddit communities to secure brand mentions in
the places AI models crawl most
Content Refresh
Instantly update your existing web pages to make them more "AI-friendly" and readable for
generative crawlers.
Competitor Intel
Analyze exactly why your competitors are winning AI citations and generate a plan to bridge the gap.
Technical Health Check
Automatically find and fix hidden technical issues, like robots.txt files that are accidentally blocking
AI bots from seeing your site.
Impact
GEO became one of Writesonic's fastest-growing products—and a competitive advantage.
We started closing five-figure deals with enterprise customers. Marketing agencies and Fortune 500 companies like Amazon, Unilever, Zoho, and Acer came on board. These weren't just sales—they were validation that we'd solved a real problem.
The team expanded to support the growth. New customer engineers, and customer success folks joined to scale what we'd built.
Reflection
Teamwork shined here
Without the product vision, the engineering team's experiments to stubbornly work on a UX-friendly product, and the sales and CS teams' constant feedback—none of this would be possible.
I learned that a solid feedback loop is so important at every stage: discovery, design, and development.
Product thinking
I learned to not just focus on what other competitors are doing, but to think deeply about an industry and look beyond it into the future.
GEO isn't just about tracking AI citations. It's about understanding where search is going and helping brands stay ahead.