The starting point
Our site had solid content but was practically invisible to answer engines: no structured markup, no presence in external directories, a handful of old URLs returning 404 errors, and a blog that didn't exist yet. If you asked ChatGPT or Perplexity "AI consulting firms in Barcelona," we didn't show up anywhere — not even by accident.
The technical side: schema markup and llms.txt
We started with the fastest to implement:
- Schema.org (Organization, WebSite, FAQPage) across all 4 language versions of the homepage.
llms.txtfile at the domain root, summarising who we are, what services we offer, and linking the blog's most relevant content.- Article schema on every blog post, with publish and modification dates.
This took less than a day and cost nothing — it's the highest return-on-effort improvement we made in the whole process.
Fixing what was broken
Auditing turned up old URLs (/soluciones/, /soluciones-tecnologicas/, an orphaned /es path) that Google had indexed but were returning 404 errors. A crawler that hits errors loses trust in the rest of the site. We fixed them with 301 redirects to the current sections.
Later, while reviewing Search Console reports, we also found broken internal links in older blog posts — in one case, an entire article's body had been left untranslated in Swedish. Every one of these errors, however small, is a negative signal for crawling.
Weekly content designed to be cited
We started publishing one article a week, each answering a concrete question someone would ask an AI assistant directly — not generic keywords, but the actual phrasing of a real business doubt. The first article in this series, about how to appear in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers, surpassed 2,000 impressions within a few weeks — proof that the format works and that it's worth going deeper on the same topic instead of dropping it after one post.
External presence: directories and reviews
This was the part we underestimated the most. We signed up on GoodFirms, Sortlist, Clutch and agenciasia.ai, completed our Google Business Profile, and activated LinkedIn with regular posts.
What we learned: some directories publish your profile immediately, others leave it "under review" for several days before it's public. And even once the profile exists, Google can take 1 to 4 weeks to index it — so searching for your own company the same day you sign up and not finding it doesn't mean something went wrong.
We also ran a simple ask to satisfied clients: a 1-minute review on Google, GoodFirms and Sortlist. Reviews are a trust signal that both directories and AI engines weigh, and we were starting from zero.
The results so far
- New blog pages get indexed by Google within 24-72 hours after manually requesting it in Search Console.
- Long-tail content (specific questions) is already showing up in relevant searches, including the very GEO article that kicked off this series.
- Generic, competitive queries ("AI consulting Barcelona") still don't rank us — that's the part that takes longest, since it depends on directories finishing indexing and on accumulating reviews and backlinks.
What we learned
- The technical part is fast; the external part is slow. Schema markup and llms.txt happen in hours. Directories, reviews and backlinks build up over weeks or months.
- Long-tail content pays off first. Competing for generic terms is an uphill battle; answering specific, real questions gains traction much sooner.
- One hit deserves a series. Instead of moving to the next topic as soon as one post works, it's worth going deeper into the same territory from different angles — which is exactly what we're doing with this GEO series.
Conclusion
There are no shortcuts, but you don't need a huge budget either: most of what we did was well-directed time, not money. If you want to apply this same process to your company, at Dataverse Solutions we offer a free 30-minute GEO audit.