Skip to content

Add GEO guide #957

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Merged
merged 4 commits into from
Jul 25, 2025
Merged
Show file tree
Hide file tree
Changes from all commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions docs.json
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -45,6 +45,7 @@
"ai/contextual-menu",
"ai/markdown-export",
"mcp",
"guides/geo",
"guides/claude-code",
"guides/cursor",
"guides/windsurf"
Expand Down
99 changes: 99 additions & 0 deletions guides/geo.mdx
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,99 @@
---
title: "GEO guide: Optimize docs for AI search and answer engines"
sidebarTitle: "GEO"
description: "Make your documentation more discoverable and cited more frequently by AI tools"
icon: "cpu"

Check warning on line 5 in guides/geo.mdx

View check run for this annotation

Mintlify / Mintlify Validation (mintlify) - vale-spellcheck

guides/geo.mdx#L5

Did you really mean 'cpu'?
---

Optimize your documentation for both traditional search engines and AI-powered answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) focuses on being cited by AI systems through comprehensive content and structured information, while traditional SEO targets search result rankings.

## GEO quickstart

### Initial setup

1. **Make sure your docs are being indexed** in your `docs.json` settings
2. **Audit current pages** for missing descriptions and titles

### Content improvements

1. **Add comparison tables** to appropriate pages
2. **Audit headings** to ensure they answer common questions
3. **Improve internal linking** between related topics
4. **Test with AI tools** to verify accuracy

## GEO best practices

In general, well written and well structured documentation will have strong GEO. You should still prioritize writing for your users, and if your content is meeting their needs, you will be well on your way to optimizing for AI tools. Creating genuinely helpful content rather than optimizing for optimization's sake is rewarded by both traditional and AI search engines.

Focus on:

- Content aligned to user needs rather than keyword matching
- Structured, scannable information
- Direct answers to questions
Copy link
Collaborator

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

more philosophical question — should we encourage people to have a FAQs page that has direct answers? this is a product question as well, like the community forum / support use case

Copy link
Contributor Author

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Historically, FAQ pages have been dismissed by tech writers since you can't ever know every question someone is going to ask and people didn't really search in full questions.

But now people are asking full questions of these tools, so FAQs might be better.

Kind of a frontier and a shift in best practice so I don't know what's actually going to perform best. Reflexively, I don't want to encourage FAQ pages, but they might now be way more valuable than they were in the past.


### Format for clarity

These formatting practices help AI tools parse and understand your content:

- Don't skip heading levels (H1 → H2 → H3)
- Use specific object names instead of "it" or "this"
- Label code blocks with their programming language
- Give images descriptive alt text
- Link to related concepts to help AI understand relationships

### Answer questions directly

Write content that addresses specific user questions:

- Begin sections with the main takeaway
- Use descriptive headings that match common queries
- Break complex topics into numbered steps

## Mintlify configuration

Use these features to improve GEO.

### Add descriptive page metadata

Include clear titles and descriptions in your frontmatter:

Check warning on line 60 in guides/geo.mdx

View check run for this annotation

Mintlify / Mintlify Validation (mintlify) - vale-spellcheck

guides/geo.mdx#L60

Did you really mean 'frontmatter'?

```mdx
---
title: "API authentication guide"
description: "Complete guide to implementing API authentication with code examples"
---
```

### Configure global indexing settings

Add to your `docs.json`:

```json
{
"seo": {

Check warning on line 75 in guides/geo.mdx

View check run for this annotation

Mintlify / Mintlify Validation (mintlify) - vale-spellcheck

guides/geo.mdx#L75

Did you really mean 'seo'?
"indexing": "all",
"metatags": {

Check warning on line 77 in guides/geo.mdx

View check run for this annotation

Mintlify / Mintlify Validation (mintlify) - vale-spellcheck

guides/geo.mdx#L77

Did you really mean 'metatags'?
"og:type": "website",
"og:site_name": "Your docs"
}
}
}
```

### LLMs.txt

LLMs.txt files help AI systems understand your documentation structure, similar to how sitemaps help search engines. Mintlify automatically generates LLMs.txt files for your docs. No configuration is required.

## Testing your documentation

Test various AI tools with questions about your product and documentation to see how well your docs are being cited.

**Ask AI assistants specific questions about your docs:**
- "How do I set up authentication using this API?"
- "Walk me through the installation process step by step"

**Check that tools provide:**
- Correct code samples
- Accurate step-by-step instructions