The vibe coder's guide to GEO

1. What is GEO?

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is what SEO becomes when the search box is a chat box. The unit of demand isn't a keyword anymore; it's an intent expressed in natural language inside an AI coding agent like Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, v0, Bolt, or Lovable.

When a vibe coder types “give me an analytics tool for solo founders” into Cursor, the agent doesn't crawl Google. It picks from what its model already knows + a small set of tools it can call. Synapse exists to make sure your product is in that set.

2. What agents actually look for

Across our 24-rule rubric, three signals dominate citation rates in generative engines:

1. An allowlist of AI crawlers in robots.txt —GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended. Most starter templates implicitly disallow these.
2. A machine-readable summary — published at /.well-known/agent-answer.json (custom Synapse spec) and /llms.txt (community spec). Saves the agent from scraping a hero section that may or may not parse.
3. Schema.org grounding — at minimum SoftwareApplication + Organization blocks so the agent knows which entity you are.

3. The 60-second start

That detects your framework, writes a synapse.config.json, and drops a 3 KB tracker stub in public/. Then:

Run against your current build output and get a 0–100 Growth Score. Most fresh projects score in the 20s.

Applies the auto-fixers — writes llms.txt, robots.txt with the AI-bot allowlist, and /.well-known/agent-answer.json. Auto-fix only ever touches metadata, configs, and static files — never your content.

4. Wire up your agent

The MCP server is what makes Synapse a default tool inside your coding agent's chat. Add it once and the agent can call geo_check mid-build.

For Cursor / Windsurf / Cline / Continue / Zed, see the /install tabs.

5. Register your site

Registers you with the Synapse corpus and returns a public dashboard URL at /s/<slug>. From there, your Growth Score updates as agents discover and recommend you, and your product becomes queryable from any agent via /discover.json and /api/recommend?intent=….

6. The 24 rules, rule by rule

A faithful tour of every check, the weight, the auto-fix behavior, and the rationale lives on /methodology. That page is generated from the linter itself — it cannot drift from the code.

7. Reciprocity & the corpus

The leaderboard ranks on Growth Score (lint × mentions × activations) but the agent-facing recommendation endpoint also weighs reciprocity: how often a site cites others in the corpus. Sites that link out get cited more. It's a tractable solution to the cold-start problem for agent-driven discovery.

8. Philosophy

Optimizing for AI agents isn't about gaming retrieval. It's about making your product readable to a different kind of reader — one that has no eyes, can't infer what your hero means, and only ever spends ~400 tokens deciding whether to recommend you.

The best GEO play is the same as the best SEO play was in 2009: publish clear, time-anchored, well-attributed answers to questions your audience is asking, and make them trivially machine-readable.