You don't have to be the Yankees to show up in ChatGPT

You can be the A's. I keep having the same conversation with business owners. They assume AI search works like the rest of the internet: the big brand wins, the big budget wins, the site with ten thousand backlinks wins. So they figure there's no point trying.

That's the Yankees theory. And in AI search it's wrong.

The A's didn't buy stars. They bought base runners.

In 2002 the Oakland A's had a payroll about a third the size of the Yankees. They won 103 games anyway. They did it by noticing that everyone else was paying for the flashy stuff, home runs and big names, while the thing that actually won games was boring: get on base. Over and over. Walks counted. Singles counted. The scoreboard didn't care how you got there.

AI search engines are keeping score the same way, and almost nobody has noticed yet.

What ChatGPT is actually scoring

When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity "who's the best orthodontist in Carmel Valley" or "what's a good project management tool for a 10-person team," the model doesn't rank websites. It reads a handful of pages, pulls out the sentences that answer the question, and cites the ones it used.

So the question it's asking of your page isn't "how famous is this company." It's "can I quote this." Is the answer stated plainly? Does it say who wrote it and when? Can my crawler even get in? Is there something specific here, a number, a name, a definition, or is it fluff?

That's on-base percentage. A page either gets on base or it doesn't. The brand name on the door doesn't swing the bat.

Here's the part that should make you happy

Big brands are mostly terrible at this. Their pages are built by committees, buried in marketing language, wrapped in scripts the crawlers can't read, and nobody has touched the metadata since 2019. They're paying for home run power in a league that's now rewarding walks.

We score real sites on this every month in our AI Visibility Index. Nike, one of the most recognizable brands on earth, scores a 78. Hello Bonsai, a tool for freelancers most people have never heard of, scores a 74. Slack and Dropbox, with engineering teams in the thousands, sit in the mid-70s next to two-person SaaS companies. monday.com, a public company, grades a D because it blocks the AI crawlers at the door. The spread among the big brands is wider than any gap between big and small.

And the research backs it up. The Princeton study that coined the term GEO found that adding citations to a page raised its AI visibility by 115 percent for the site ranked fifth, while the site ranked first lost 30 percent. Ahrefs found that 62 percent of Google AI Overview citations come from pages that don't rank in the top 10. Backlinks, the thing the Yankees have been buying for twenty years, had the weakest correlation with AI visibility of anything measured.

That's the gap. The market is mispricing a skill that costs almost nothing. The A's would be all over it.

How to get on base

Four things, in order. None of them need a budget. All of them need an afternoon.

Let the crawlers in. Check that your robots.txt isn't blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. This is the batter actually walking up to the plate, and it's the single biggest penalty in our grader because nothing else counts if the engine can't read you.

Answer the question in the first sentence. Every important page should open with the plain answer to the question that page exists for. Not a warm-up paragraph. The answer. That's the sentence that gets quoted.

Put something specific on the page. A number, a named example, a definition, a real quote. Vague pages don't get quoted because there's nothing to quote.

Put a name and a date on it. An author, a bio, a visible updated date. The model is deciding whether a human stands behind this, and anonymous pages lose that call.

Do those four and you're on base. Do them on your ten most important pages and you're a lineup. Schema and llms.txt come after, and if anyone tells you llms.txt is the big lever, ask them for the data. We did, and it's thin.

Where to start

Run your site through the Protony GEO Grader. Twelve seconds, no signup, and it hands you a score out of 100 and a ranked list of exactly what to fix. Most sites we see come back between 50 and 70, and the top two fixes are usually worth 15 to 20 points by themselves.

The Yankees will figure this out eventually. Right now they haven't. That window is yours.