# SEO and GEO for seed-stage SaaS What search work pays off at seed stage: technical basics, a handful of buyer-intent pages and AI-answer visibility, before you have a content team. Canonical: https://ignura.com/seed-stage-saas Last updated: 2026-10-28 Author: Ignura ## In short - At seed stage, the search work that pays off is small: make sure Google and the AI crawlers can read your site, write 5 to 10 pages that answer what buyers ask before they pick a tool, and get onto the lists AI engines quote. - Skip volume chasing and a big blog calendar. You have no content team yet, and seed buyers search for the problem and the comparison, not for your name. - Measure it with citations in your buyers' questions and Search Console impressions, because traffic is too thin to read yet. Start with a free Growth Check. ## What to skip at seed Two habits take most of a seed team's search time and do little. The first is chasing search volume. Large sites already rank for the high-volume terms, and most people typing them are not buying yet. The second is a big blog calendar. Three posts a week with nobody to edit or update them leaves a pile of thin pages that neither Google nor an AI engine has a reason to quote. What a seed buyer types is narrower: the problem in their own words, "best X for Y" and "you vs a rival". Those searches are small, and they are the ones that end in a sign-up or a call. For the zero-budget version, read [SEO for startups with no budget](https://ignura.com/blog/seo-for-startups-no-budget). ## The first 90 days, in order 1. **Indexing and AI crawler access.** Check that Google indexes your key pages and that the AI search crawlers can reach them. OpenAI says ChatGPT search answers leave out sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot, and Perplexity asks sites to allow PerplexityBot to appear in its results. A robots.txt block does not keep a page out of Google either. Google says to use noindex for that. The free [AI crawler checker](https://ignura.com/tools/ai-crawler-checker) shows which AI crawlers your robots.txt lets in, and the full checklist is on [technical SEO](https://ignura.com/technical-seo). 2. **5 to 10 buyer-intent pages.** One page for each question a buyer asks before choosing: the problem you solve, who it is for, how it works, and a pricing page that people and agents can both read. Each page answers its question in its first two lines. 3. **Comparison pages.** A fair "you vs rival" page and an alternatives page for the tool your buyers already know. Fairness matters, because AI engines rarely quote a page where you always win. [How to write SaaS comparison pages](https://ignura.com/blog/saas-comparison-pages) has the structure. 4. **The lists AI engines read.** AI answers cite other people's pages: best-of lists, review sites, directories and threads. Find the ones cited for your buyers' questions, fix the listings you control, then ask the authors of the rest to review you. That is the work on [citations](https://ignura.com/citations). This is the seed-stage cut of our [90-day guide to SEO for SaaS startups](https://ignura.com/blog/seo-for-saas-startups), cut down to what a team with no content hire can ship. ## How to measure with no traffic yet Seed-stage traffic is too small to read week to week, so measure the signals that move first. Start with citations. Write down 20 questions your buyers ask, run them on ChatGPT and Perplexity on a fixed schedule, and count how often you are named. One run proves little because answers change between runs, so keep the questions and the method the same each time. Then watch Search Console impressions, which rise before clicks do. Since June 2026 Search Console has had generative AI reports that show how often your URLs appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Google says they reached every site on 31 August 2026. Visits and sign-ups come later. When they start, give AI referrals their own channel in analytics so you can see what each source sends. ## How Ignura fits this stage Ignura is a GEO and SEO agency for B2B SaaS and devtools. With a seed-stage team we work through the four steps above in that order, and report citations and impressions as we go. What it costs is on [pricing](https://ignura.com/pricing). ## Questions ### Is SEO worth doing at seed stage? Yes, if you keep it small. A site Google and AI crawlers can read, about ten pages that answer buyer questions and a place on the lists AI engines quote are worth doing now. A large content programme can wait until someone is there to run it. ### What is GEO, and does a seed startup need it? GEO means getting your product named when a buyer asks an AI engine which tool to use. Most of its groundwork is the same as SEO: readable pages that answer the question. The extra step at seed is finding the lists and reviews those engines cite and getting onto them. ### How many pages does a seed-stage SaaS site need? Five to ten pages aimed at buyer questions is a good first set: the problem, your main use cases, pricing, one or two comparisons and an alternatives page. Add more once those are indexed and you can see which questions they appear for. ### Should we block AI crawlers? You can block the training crawlers, but let the search ones in. OpenAI separates GPTBot, for training, from OAI-SearchBot, for search, and Perplexity says PerplexityBot is for search results, not model training. Blocking the search crawlers keeps you out of those answers. ### How do we know it is working before traffic arrives? Track two numbers: how often you are named across the same 20 buyer questions, and your impressions in Search Console, including its generative AI report. Both move before visits do. ## Sources - OpenAI: [Overview of OpenAI crawlers](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots) - Perplexity: [Perplexity crawlers](https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots) - Google Search Central: [Introduction to robots.txt](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/intro) - Google Search Central: [Search generative AI performance reports (3 Jun 2026)](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/06/gen-ai-performance-reports) Book a 15-minute call about your website: https://ignura.com/book