How to Prep Your Author Website for GEO vs. SEO (A Step-by-Step Guide for Fiction Writers)

What is GEO?

Generative Engine Optimization means optimizing your author website so AI search engines (like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity) can understand, trust, and recommend your books.

Why It Matters

AI search and agents are quickly becoming a major part of the search and shopper experience. In fact, customer conversion when a product is surfaced via AI is around 16x greater than traditional SEO and manual Google search. As more people convert to the AI search experience, if AI doesn't know your brand, books, and writing styles, it cannot recommend you, and that will render you invisible.

What most authors need in this shift is an AI-optimized website.

A home base.

A place that will build a brand, attract a loyal fan base, and allow AI search to scrape important data so they can recommend you. There are many ways to do this, but I love going after the low-hanging fruit: The landing pages for your books on your website.

So let's fix that.

The Big Shift: Think Like AI, Not Google

• AI search doesn’t care about keywords, it cares about questions and context.
• Write how humans ask things: “What are the best cozy mystery books with seaside settings?” instead of keyword dumps like “cozy mystery, seaside mystery, romantic cozy novel.”
• Your site should look conversational and natural to both AI and readers.

Blog for GEO (Your Secret Weapon)

According to industry research, 33% of the pages AI pulls from are blogs.  

Create consistent blog content — even 2 posts a month — to build authority.

• End every blog with an FAQ block (at least 3–5 real reader questions).
• Use clear, human headers that mirror how people search.
  Example: “Where should first-time readers start in my series?”
• Link naturally to your book pages.

The One-Page Mistake That's Killing Your Visibility

Here's what happens: You write your first book. You create a beautiful page for it. Then you write a second book, and instead of creating a new page, you rename the first page to "Books" and list both titles there. This is a huge mistake. When you do this, search engines can't figure out which book to rank you for, and they can't distinguish between your titles. And Google continues to just send people to Amazon instead because Amazon has done the structural work you haven't.

The fix is simple: Every book needs its own dedicated landing page. Create a master "Books" page that displays your covers and links to each individual book page. This page should also answer: Which book should readers start with? What's your recommended reading order? If you've written multiple series, consider giving each series its own page as well that covers themes and highly detailed specifics pertaining to the series.

The Boring Section That Changes Everything

Here's the part nobody likes but everybody needs: metadata.

• On every book page, you need a section that includes:
• ISBN for every format (paperback, ebook, audiobook)
• ASIN numbers
• Publisher information
• BISAC categories
• Publication year
• Country of origin
• Everything that appears on your copyright page

"But readers don't care about that," you're thinking.

You're right. But AI does.

When you include all your ISBN numbers, you're teaching AI systems that your paperback, eBook, and audiobook are the same book. Without this, they treat each format as a separate entity. Your reviews get fragmented, and recommendations get diluted.

Think of it this way: if the information matters enough to print on your copyright page, it matters enough to include on your website.

Most visitors won't look at this section (unless you spruce it up—which I recommend). But the crawlers and AI systems parsing your site absolutely will. And going forward, those systems are what allow AI to make book recommendations to readers.

How to Beat Amazon (Hint: It's Not About Reviews)

You can't out-review Amazon. You probably can't match their traffic or their shipping.

But you can beat them in content—which is the secret to not only attracting AI search real estate but also giving readers the "experience" they often want in going to an author website. Your goal is to make your book page more useful than Amazon's.

Here's how:

The Essentials: High-resolution book cover — Higher quality than Amazon offers. Journalists, content creators, and readers doing image searches will find yours first.

Full back cover copy — Not just your one-paragraph pitch. The complete version.

Sample chapters — Offer 20-30 pages as a downloadable PDF. Kindle has samples, but not everyone uses Kindle. And AI loves having more text to analyze.

Tropes — List them clearly. Use a graphic or a simple bulleted list. Readers search by trope now. If your page doesn't mention them, you're invisible to those searches.

Full endorsements — Amazon makes you trim blurbs. You don't have to. Include the complete quotes.

Like Authors — Frame this in the way a reader would, i.e.: "What authors are like Stephen King?

FAQs — Answer the questions readers actually ask you: What's the price? Are there signed copies? What age is this book fit for? Use proper FAQ formatting. When someone searches for a similar question, your page can show up in results.

Short Bio — Add a 2-4 sentence bio that writes about you in the third person and that gives some details on your geographical location, so local AI Search queries help surface you.

The Supplemental Materials That Set You Apart

AI search favors rich content:

• Add images, videos, tables, and charts wherever possible.
  For example:
  • A table of character names and relationships.
  • A “series timeline” graphic.
  • A 30-second book trailer or animated teaser.

Multimodal content boosts credibility because AI models are trained to prioritize pages that combine text, visuals, and structured information. Some examples below:

For Fiction:

• Character compendiums (especially useful for series)
• High-resolution maps (as downloadable files so readers can zoom)
• Deleted scenes or bonus epilogues
• Timelines (if your story jumps between time periods)
• Glossaries
• Spotify playlists from your writing process
• Recipes from the world
• Book trailers or author trailers

For Nonfiction:

• Worksheets and Templates
• Checklists
• Workbooks (if you're not selling a separate companion)
• Expanded case studies

All of this serves two purposes:

1. It makes readers value your website as a resource.
2. It gives search engines and AI more reasons to direct traffic to you instead of Amazon.

P.S. — If you want a non-perfect example, you can check out what I've done at my own website: https://www.izaicyorks.com/aithos

Good Luck!

– Artcile by guest blogger:  Izaic Yorks | fantasy author | writing stories of timeless virtue

Oh, want to read one of my books for free? Grab a copy of: The Bards Guide to Surviving a Dragon’s Attack

Veritate et Virtute.