From SEO to GEO: a 30-day playbook for export teams

Most export manufacturers have spent years on SEO and trade platforms, yet may still be absent from a channel their overseas buyers increasingly use: AI assistants. Here is a practical 30-day plan for establishing a baseline, fixing foundations and measuring change.

Week 1 — Baseline

• —List 20 buying prompts your buyers would ask (category, comparison, sourcing questions).
• —Run them across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Record mentions, citations, competitors.
• —Run a GEO audit on your website: crawler access, structured data, content structure.

Week 2 — Fix the foundations

• —Open your site to AI crawlers you're comfortable with; fix robots and rendering blockers.
• —Add Organization, Product and FAQ schema to your key pages.
• —Rewrite your top 5 pages around specific, verifiable claims — capacities, certifications, lead times — the raw material AI engines cite.

Week 3 — Build citable assets

Engines cite sources that answer questions cleanly. Publish two or three assets that do exactly that: a buyer's guide for your category, a certification explainer, a transparent factory-capability page. English first — that's where the answer volume is.

Week 4 — Measure and loop

Re-run your prompt set. You're looking for movement, not perfection: one new mention, one new citation. Then put monitoring on a schedule, because answers shift as models update. Visibility in AI answers is a program, not a project.

The suppliers who win the next decade of export demand are being written into AI answers right now — mostly unopposed.