Finn Garden · Newsletter
Perplexity made me a sale in 17 minutes
One Sunday evening in September, someone lands on one of my products. Not from Google: from Perplexity. And not on the home page: straight on the features page.
Twelve seconds later, they click « Sign up ». They create their account, go through onboarding, and pay 17 minutes after arriving. Two months later, they still use the product. The other visitors from Perplexity also all landed on a precise page, never the home page.
Why these visitors buy faster. On my sites, people who arrive through an AI buy more readily than the others. I think they trust their AI when it recommends a service: they've already compared with it, so they arrive decided.
So SEO is no longer enough. You also need GEO: getting cited by AI.
What I do, concretely:
- One page, one question, the answer in the first lines. The AI picks up a passage, not a whole page. And that's the page it sends people to, as in my story.
- Get named elsewhere. Type the question your product answers into ChatGPT, with search on. Note the sites it cites: review platforms, « best tools » lists. Complete your profile on those platforms, and pitch your product to the authors of those lists, with facts they can check.
- Switch on Bing. That's where Copilot runs its searches. Create a free Bing Webmaster Tools account, import your site from Google Search Console, submit your sitemap. Then ask your host or your AI agent to switch on IndexNow: Bing hears about every page you change. Then open the « AI Performance » report: it shows when Copilot cites you, and the searches it ran just before.
- An llms.txt file and structured data. The first sums up your site for AI, the second tells, on every page, what it is, who wrote it and when. I regularly see Claude go and read llms.txt files.
- Measure. I look in PostHog: Web analytics, then the channels block. There's an « AI » channel that groups ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot. Click it to see which pages those visitors land on. It even counts visits where Perplexity only shows up in the link. Most of the time I don't even open it: my AI agent reads the sources for me. Ahrefs' Web Analytics module counts these visitors too.
All the detail, with sources, is in my GEO guide.
Finn
Thanks for reading!
Don't hesitate to send me feedback or ask me to dig deeper into any topic: I read every reply, always, and of course I answer every email personally.
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A brand I back
- PostHog
See what people actually do on your site, click by click. It's what tells me which pages get read to the end, and where readers drop off.
The news
For this sample, news from the archives, so it never goes stale.
- 30 November 2022: ChatGPT goes public
OpenAI released it as a simple research preview. Five days later it had passed a million users: the moment building with AI stopped being reserved for engineers.
- 14 February 1946: the first computer goes public
ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer, weighed 27 tonnes and filled a room. Changing its program meant setting switches and cables by hand, for days. Today you describe an app in one sentence.
Accounts to follow on X
- Pieter Levels@levelsio
Builds and runs his products alone, in public, revenue included. You watch the decisions happen live, failures included.
- Marc Lou@marclou
Launches small products fast and sells them alone, and shares what each one earns. The best proof that small and quick can pay.
- Paul Graham@paulg
Y Combinator's co-founder. His essays on startups are still the reference: how to start, what to build, how to grow.
A film to watch
- WhiplashDamien Chazelle · 2014
On the real price of excellence, and the line between demanding and destroying.