Milivoje Krivokapic 
In SaaS, discovery is everything. No matter how polished your product or how innovative your features, if potential buyers can’t find you, you don’t exist. For years, SaaS marketing strategies leaned heavily on SEO, paid ads, and review sites to get noticed.
But that game is changing fast.
AI-driven search tools, from Google’s AI Overviews to platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity, are reshaping how software gets discovered. Instead of clicking through a list of blog posts titled “Top 10 Tools for X,” buyers now ask an AI. In seconds, it delivers a ready-made shortlist. The question isn’t where your SaaS ranks anymore, but whether it’s mentioned in the answer at all.
That’s where GEO comes in.
To find an answer to the question “What is GEO?” and why it matters, let’s go through some of the key elements and tips related to the future of visibility.
What Is GEO, and Why Should SaaS Care?
A startup founder types “best project management tools for small teams” into Google. In the past, they’d scroll through a mix of ads and blog lists. Today, they’ll see an AI Overview summarizing the top tools right on the search page. No extra clicks needed.
Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, means making your content and data readable for AI. Instead of fighting for a higher spot in Google’s first page, you’re positioning your SaaS so it shows up inside AI-generated answers.
And this isn’t just a niche trend. Around 16% of all U.S. searches now include an AI Overview, more than double the share just a few months ago. That’s roughly one in six searches where Google answers the query directly on the page.
For SaaS marketing strategies, that shift is huge. Visibility is no longer about who dominates page one. It’s about who the AI trusts enough to recommend. And trust comes from structured, machine-readable data: clear product descriptions, accurate feeds, and the right signals that generative engines can easily pick up.
Enter llms.txt: Your “Do/Don’t List” for AI Crawlers.
If you’ve ever managed a website, you’ve probably heard of robots.txt. They’re a small file that tells search engines which pages they can or can’t crawl. Today, llms.txt works the same way, but for large language models (LLMs) like those powering ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Think of it as a do/don’t list for AI crawlers. You can use llms.txt to say:
- “These product pages are fine for AI to use.”
- “Don’t touch our private knowledge base.”
- “Update from this directory, not that outdated blog archive.”
When creating SaaS marketing strategies, this matters more than it sounds. If generative engines pull information from the wrong place, they may recommend outdated pricing, miss a key feature, or even misrepresent your tool entirely. A carefully written llms.txt file helps you guide AI toward the content you want it to use when recommending your product.
And because this standard is still emerging, early adopters have the advantage. Adding llms.txt today doesn’t just protect your content. It signals to AI systems that your SaaS is structured, current, and ready to be included in future recommendations.
Product Feeds and Structured Data: Speaking the AI’s Language
Generative engines work best when information is neatly organized. That’s where product feeds and structured data come in. Instead of making AI systems guess what your SaaS does, you hand them a clean, structured version of the facts.
Product feeds act like a digital catalog. For SaaS companies, that might include details like:
- Core features (CRM, integrations, reporting)
- Pricing tiers (free trial, starter, enterprise)
- Supported platforms (web, iOS, Android)
Structured data, like schema markup, works behind the scenes on your website. It uses tags that tell search engines and AI exactly what they’re looking at. For example, <Product>, <Review>, or <FAQ> markup can make your features, ratings, and common questions crystal clear to machines.
Without structure, your product page looks like a long, unorganized paragraph to AI. With feeds and schema, it’s like giving the AI a spreadsheet: clean, precise, and easy to summarize.
For SaaS marketing strategies, this is a game-changer. A project management tool that marks up its “free trial,” “5-star reviews,” and “Slack integration” has a far better chance of being cited correctly in AI answers than one that leaves info buried in plain text.
GEO in Action for SaaS Companies
Let’s bring it down to a real scenario.
A small business owner types into Perplexity, for example: “What’s the best invoicing software for freelancers?”
- Without GEO, the AI scrapes scattered reviews from a forum or an outdated blog. Your tool isn’t mentioned, even though it’s a perfect fit.
- With GEO: When GEO is in place, your site uses llms.txt to guide crawlers and a product feed to present features and pricing, and the AI can clearly understand your software. The summary highlights your free trial, ease of use, and integrations.
It’s a natural extension of SaaS marketing strategies. In the same way teams once optimized content for search engines, they now need to shape their product data so AI can get it clearly.
Where SaaS Teams Should Start
Answering the question “What is GEO?” might sound too techy, but the first steps are practical and within reach.
Here’s a simple starting checklist for SaaS teams:
- Audit your site content: Ask yourself: can AI engines clearly understand what your product does, who it’s for, and how it’s priced? If the answer is no, start cleaning up your product pages.
- Add an llms.txt file: Use it to guide AI crawlers toward the pages you want represented, and block the ones you don’t.
- Build a structured product feed: Organize your features, pricing tiers, and integrations in a way machines can easily read.
- Use schema markup: Apply tags like
<Product>,<Review>, and<FAQ>so your content is machine-readable. - Track your presence in AI answers: Tools like Perplexity can help you see if your product is being mentioned.
As a SaaS team, you don’t really need to reinvent the wheel in this new scenario. You just need to extend existing SaaS marketing strategies into a new stage where answers matter more than rankings.
Get Your SaaS Into the AI Shortlist
Buyers are no longer sifting through endless lists of “top tools”. They’re asking AI systems for answers and trusting the results they see. For SaaS companies, that means visibility isn’t just about ranking well in search engines anymore. It’s about being part of the answer when a potential customer asks for solutions.
That’s exactly what GEO is about: preparing your product data so it can be accurately understood, summarized, and recommended by generative engines.
At Zlurad, we help SaaS teams go beyond traditional playbooks. By weaving GEO into modern SaaS marketing strategies, we make sure your software doesn’t just exist online, but gets recommended where buying decisions are actually happening.
In this new era of discovery, the SaaS products that take control of their data are the ones that get named first.