We previously wrote a GEO primer on how to get found by AI. But after a while, many people find that even after publishing content and getting indexed, Doubao and DeepSeek still barely recommend them, while competitors get mentioned again and again. What’s the difference? We recently ran a deeper round of research, and the conclusion is counterintuitive — treating every AI as one single thing to optimize for is the biggest mistake. Today we’ll cover advanced tactics for improving GEO results in 2026, especially what content each AI actually “eats”.
Key insight: there is no “universal solution” for domestic AI
A third party analyzed tens of millions of AI sources and over a million Q&A sessions from late 2025, and the conclusion is clear: Doubao, Yuanbao, DeepSeek, Wenxin and Kimi each favor different content sources, and the overlap is lower than you’d think. If you do well on one platform, you may be completely ignored on another. So the first step in advanced GEO is to figure out which AI you want to win over — and what content it “eats”.
The content sources each AI prefers (key)
| AI assistant | Clearly preferred content sources |
|---|---|
| Doubao (ByteDance) | ByteDance ecosystem: Toutiao, Douyin and others; mobile sources account for a very high share |
| Tencent Yuanbao | WeChat Official Accounts + Baidu ecosystem (Baijiahao / Baidu Baike) |
| ERNIE Bot (Baidu) | Strongly favors Baidu’s own ecosystem, with Baijiahao dominating |
| DeepSeek | Omnivorous and scattered in sources: Sohu, Baidu Baike, NetEase and others |
| Kimi | Leans toward WeChat Official Accounts plus news sites such as Sohu |
How to use this table: whichever AI your customers mainly use, focus your distribution on the channels it prefers. For example, to win over Tencent Yuanbao, WeChat Official Accounts are the main battlefield; to be recommended by Doubao, you need to publish on ByteDance platforms such as Toutiao.
The most cost-effective approach: first build a base that “works across platforms”
You can’t go deep on every platform, so start with the common denominator. One very practical finding from our research: Sohu, NetEase and Toutiao all have relatively high citation rates across several mainstream AIs, making them high-quality sources with broad compatibility and a strong cost-performance ratio. So the pragmatic order for small and mid-sized businesses is:
- Base layer (do first): your own website plus Sohu, NetEase and Toutiao accounts; distribute one piece of content and cover several AIs at once.
- Dedicated channels (add later): to strengthen a specific AI, add its dedicated turf — WeChat Official Accounts for Yuanbao, Baijiahao for ERNIE Bot, Douyin/Toutiao for Doubao.
- Don’t expect one platform to cover everything: only when content appears repeatedly on several high-authority platforms does its chance of being trusted go up.
How to write content so AI is willing to “quote” you
Publishing in the right place isn’t enough — the content itself has to be easy for AI to extract. Overseas academic research (Princeton and others), validated across tens of thousands of queries and tens of thousands of AI citation samples, found a clear pattern: content that puts the answer first and answers the question directly at the start is significantly more likely to be cited by AI (roughly twice as likely or more). In practice, when writing:
- Answer first: give the conclusion in the first sentence or two; don’t spend paragraphs on buildup. Both AI and users read the opening first.
- Use lists and structure: lists and tables such as “5 steps” or “a comparison of 3 scenarios” are far easier to extract than long blocks of prose.
- Clear heading hierarchy: proper subheadings let AI quickly locate “which question this section answers”.
- Use comparison tables and FAQs more: question-and-answer pairs and side-by-side comparisons are the formats AI most likes to lift directly.
One more reminder: don’t waste effort on llms.txt
Many tutorials still push llms.txt, but the latest data is even more decisive: one study counted 515 million AI crawler requests to a site within 90 days, of which only 408 touched llms.txt; another study of 137,000 domains found that more than 90% of llms.txt files received zero requests that month. Google has also stated clearly that it neither helps nor hurts you and that search doesn’t use it at all. Conclusion: keep it as a basic configuration and leave it at that — don’t invest time in it as a growth tactic. What actually drives AI citations is publishing on the right platforms and writing extractable, answer-style content.
How to know if it’s working: build a baseline with monitoring tools
GEO is slow to show results, so you can’t rely on gut feeling. By 2026 there are mature GEO monitoring tools that cover DeepSeek, Doubao, Kimi, Yuanbao, Baidu AI and other entry points, scoring you across dimensions such as recommendation frequency, visibility, whether you rank first, competitor comparisons, sentiment and source quality. The recommended approach: measure a baseline first and record whether and how each AI currently mentions you; then after continuous optimization, re-test at regular intervals, judging results with data instead of guesswork. If you don’t have a tool, the simplest method is to periodically search a few business keywords across the various AIs yourself and see whether they recommend you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: With so many platforms, how can a small company possibly keep up?
A: Don’t try to do it all. Start with the cross-platform base of “your website + Sohu/NetEase/Toutiao”, then based on whichever AI your customers use most, add one dedicated channel (such as WeChat Official Accounts). Doing three or four channels consistently beats doing ten platforms half-heartedly.
Q: Can I just copy and paste the same content across platforms?
A: Not advisable. Adapting one draft for multiple platforms works better — keep the core of answer-first, list-based structure, but adjust the title and tone for each platform to avoid stiff duplication that gets demoted.
Q: How long does GEO take to show results?
A: Again, on the order of weeks to months. AI needs to re-crawl and re-trust, so you can’t rush it. The key is consistent output plus tracking with monitoring tools — don’t give up after two weeks with no movement.
Q: Does GEO conflict with traditional SEO?
A: No. They overlap heavily at the foundation. High-quality answer-style content and being indexed by search engines both benefit SEO and GEO at the same time — one effort, two payoffs.
Want AI to recommend you more, but can’t figure out which platforms to use or how to publish?
Siwenlide helps small and medium-sized businesses in Beijing and the surrounding area grow inbound leads through their website and GEO/SEO content: we help you choose the right platforms based on each AI’s content preferences, write your content in the answer-style formats AI likes to cite, and handle multi-platform distribution and performance tracking. We keep testing and refining this approach on our own site. Visit siwenlide.com or call 400-686-2011 to talk it over.
