Will Updating My Company's Wikipedia Page Help GEO Performance?
I have had several conversations concerning Wikipedia's role in creating a healthy GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) strategy.
There is an idea floating around that curating your wikipedia page is vital to getting noticed and cited by LLM's like ChatGPT and Gemini. This is false. LLM's use Wikipedia because it is...
- Objective
- Clear
- High Authority
The short answer
Engineering your Wikipedia page around your agenda defeats the purpose of why LLM's use Wikipedia. Doing this will result in your Wikipedia page being removed, or it will prevent LLM's for citing your page due to bias (which it avoids like the plague).
The short answer here is that you should not be trying to directly influence your Wikipedia page at all. Let the community do it's thing, and LLM's will recognize the accuracy and authenticity of the information.
If you have no Wikipedia page, should you create one?
This is harder to answer. There are several benefits to having a Wikipedia page like...
- Free Backlink
- High ranking page that people can follow to your site
- High potential to rank for a branded search
However I have found it is almost impossible to create your business page objectively. Additionally, there are way more impactful activities to improve your GEO than creating a Wikipedia page. On site optimization, getting good backlinks, structuring data, and creating more objective content (like a glossary section), will all most likely have a better ROI than updating Wikipedia.
The broader conversation
What makes this conversation so interesting to me is that it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what GEO should be used for.
People who are using LLM's to find information about your brand already know about you. A proper GEO strategy is much more concerned about showing your website to people who have never heard about you. LLM's are a discovery tool, with proper execution, your website can be what is discovered.
I go into more detail about how to optimize a site and create a good GEO (or AI SEO) strategy here:
JP Popham
I have also created a suite of tools dedicated to helping companies research and implement strategies for proper GEO. I will link that project here:
SEO Helper