Will LLMs Recommend Your Project? SEO & GEO for Web3 Founders

Will LLMs Recommend Your Project? SEO & GEO for Web3 Founders
September 10, 2025

Without a doubt, one of the greatest challenges for any new business is getting noticed. The world of Web3 is no different. In the information age, with data of every kind readily available, this makes it hard for your project to be discovered.

In our latest blog, we take a look at how marketing strategies are changing, specifically how Web3 SEO – Web3 GEO is changing how we ensure our content remains discoverable.

The New Search Frontier

For the past 15 years, while Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been very effective, it is no longer the sole path to commercial discovery. With the advent and rapid adoption of AI in recent years, the new gatekeepers of the internet search are Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI powered search.

To stay one step ahead of your nearest competitor, a new hybrid approach to SEO is required. By moving beyond conventional SEO and embracing Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), your business can be, not just discovered, but actively recommended by AI platforms in their output.

From SEO to GEO: A Paradigm Shift

First conceived in 1997 byBruce Clay and John Audette, SEO is the practice of improving the visibility of your website to attract more visitors via search engines. By using specific keywords and understanding their relevance, it has been possible to create content that directly addresses your target customer needs.

Furthermore, by including backlinks to other internal pages or external websites, you are able to build the ‘authority’ of your website. Finally, by optimising the content on each page, your site becomes clear and easy to find by all the leading search engines.

So what makes GEO different? The main difference with GEO is that LLMs don’t just generate a list of search results, they synthesise the information and deliver it in a conversational answer, meaning the techniques to get noticed are far more nuanced.

LLMs use a process known as ‘grounding,’ where the LLM fact-checks results against external, verifiable, and authoritative sources, which becomes a kind of ranking signal for AI. The overarching aim of GEO, therefore, is to make sure your content or project becomes a ‘trusted source’ for an LLM to ‘ground’ its answers on. If this is done correctly, then there is a greater chance of your website being used as an ‘authoritative source’ by the leading LLMs when a user inputs a search query.

The New Playbook for Web3 Founders

How exactly do I optimise my website for AI reference? Let’s take a look at the 2 core pillars for GEO success.

Pillar 1: Content Grounding & Entity Verification

Authoritative & Structured Content:

As with SEO techniques, authoritative and structured content work best. If your website uses comprehensive documentation, white papers, and blogs, it has a far higher chance of being used by AI. It also helps if this content is written for machines as well as humans. By using clear headings and data structures such as JSON-LD, the key facts you present are readable by machines as well as humans.

Verifiable Real-World Data:

It is also beneficial to try to get your content or website referenced by major third-party aggregators. In the Web3 world these include index sites such as CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, DeFiLlama, and Crunchbase. Such third-party sources are often the first place an LLM will look to verify the existence and legitimacy of your project.

Reputable Citations:

LLMs are trained on vast datasets and prioritise information consistently cited by well-known and authoritative sources. Following on from the point above, if you can get your project or content covered by reputable Web3 news outlets and industry publications, it has a far higher chance of being picked up by the leading LLMs.

Pillar 2: Building Authority & Trust (E-E-A-T)

Successful SEO practice has largely centred around theE-E-A-T framework (Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trust) introduced by Google. In the competitive world of GEO, E-E-A-T is still vitally important because LLMs are tuned to be highly cautious about recommending projects, especially in high-stakes and reputation heavy fields like international finance.

Developer Activity & On-Chain Trust

With transparency and verification being one of the core tenets of Web3, it is no surprise to find that both pillars are required for successful GEO strategies. To increase transparency and raise your profile, you should consider opening and maintaining an active GitHub repository of open source code. You could also create a publicly available roadmap, or you could increase trust through the development of an active and engaged community on Discord and X.

Another viable option is to reference an audit of your project from Certik. Generally speaking, it is vitally important that the LLM cites your project and organisation as trustworthy and high-authority sources.

Actionable Steps for Web3 Founders

So what actionable steps can you start today, to ensure your project has greater GEO exposure?

Foundational Actions:

Conduct a comprehensive audit of your website that specifically looks at structured data and its ‘crawability’.
Ensure your project is listed on all major data aggregators.
Be sure to publish comprehensive and clear documentation that is easily searchable.

Community & PR Actions:

Take the time to build a strong and engaged community featuring both public and private channels.
Actively seek out and develop media relationships. Endeavour to be a source for reputable Web3 journalists.
Encourage community members to create and share content about your project.

Technical Actions:

Speak with your IT team to ensure that AI crawlers (e.g. GPTbot) are not blocked in your robots.xtx file.
Ensure your code or smart contract has been verified and publicly audited.

The New Web3 Mandate

The 2020s are proving to be a pivotal decade in business. AI and LLMs are not only opening but are blasting a door into a whole new marketing reality. As you can see, to stay at the forefront of your chosen Web3 sector, a successful marketing strategy must adopt a blend of traditional SEO fundamentals alongside a new focus on LLM grounding and entity verification.

The future of online discovery has changed to conversational and more human-like nuance. Even personal shopping isbenefitting from the AI treatment. It just isn’t possible to game the system any more.

AI and LLMs are the new gatekeepers and guardians of information. By proactively adopting your marketing strategy, you not only appeal to such ‘cyber librarians’ but you also demand your inclusion. By doing so your project has a much greater chance of not just surviving, but thriving.Need help navigating the web3 space and refining your Web3 marketing strategy? Take3 provides customised marketing solutions to elevate your Web3 business. Contact us today! ✌️