Key stakeholders, funders, legislators, and collaborators are now asking AI tools like Claude, CoPilot, and ChatGPT to research partnerships before meetings, grant reviews, and convenings. When stakeholders ask these tools to look for published evidence of the outcomes and successes your cradle-to-career partnership has had, they often come up short. This guide explains how large language models search for and surface indexed facts and information, how publishing information to the internet is evolving from the strategy of search engine to generative engine optimization, why it matters, and what your team can do this month and beyond to shape what the world sees about your organization.
1. What is GEO?
For twenty years, visibility online meant a spot in the top ten search results. Now a single AI-generated answer replaces the list, pulled from two to seven sources the tool trusts. GEO is the work of becoming one of them.
2. Why should cradle-to-career partnerships care?
Funders are already using AI tools to research grantees before a review. Forty-four percent of people say AI is now their main way of finding information online. When an AI summary appears at the top of a search, far fewer people click through to the source.
3. Make sure AI tools can find and read your website
Some hosting and security tools block AI crawlers by default. Cloudflare started doing this on new sites in July 2025. A short checklist, including a two-minute test anyone can run, confirms whether a site is visible at all.
4. Actions you can take today
AI tools read words, not dashboards. A study of 1.3 billion AI-crawler visits found that major crawlers download interactive dashboards but never run them. Measure Well's own review found dashboards among the most common ways partnerships publish results, which means much of that evidence may be invisible to AI tools. The guide lists six free actions a team can take this month.
5. Publish your evidence and results
Nine ways to write results so an AI tool understands them, from naming the partnership directly in the sentence to captioning every chart.
Getting your whole team in the practice of regularly viewing how funders, donors, and stakeholders experience your partnership via LLM search results is an important muscle to develop. For more best practices and tips. Need more support with this or other data and technology challenges? Reach out to the Measure Well team.
Sources referenced in this guide: