The Fundamentals of GEO: RAG, Fan-outs, Search Grounding, Entities & UGC

As AI agents such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity increasingly influence how users search, compare, and make purchase decisions, GEO represents a major shift from traditional SEO.

Yet for many marketing and SEO teams, this discipline remains complex and poorly understood.

The goal is to dive into the technical inner workings of ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI agents, including:

• The fundamentals of Search Grounding: why AI needs the web
• Query reformulation through fan-outs
• Consulting expert sources via RAG
• Chunking, scoring, and filtering of sources
• Chunk injection and response generation
• GEO optimizations
• The importance of the entity concept in the Knowledge Graph (with attributes)
• The key role of UGC in an era of distributed, cross-platform signals