Self-experiment: from new domain to 64 / 100 in six months on fernandoangulo.com

Why publish a self-experiment

Most case studies in the GEO category are theatre: anonymized “B2B SaaS client,” cherry-picked metrics, no way to verify the baseline or the methodology. fernandoangulo.com is different on purpose. It is the personal site of one of Citable’s advisors and associates. The domain was registered in November 2025 with zero existing SEO history, zero backlinks, zero schema, and zero AI search presence. We’ve been running the same checklist on it that ships to clients — without budget constraints, without timeline pressure, and with one rule: anything we publish in the Citable playbook has to work on this domain first.

You can verify every number in this study yourself. Run the Citable AI Visibility Checker on fernandoangulo.com right now. The score, the passing signals, the failing signals, and the fix list are public.

About the site

fernandoangulo.com is a one-person personal brand site belonging to a Citable advisor and associate. It runs on Astro (same stack as citable.agency), hosted on Vercel, with bilingual EN + ES content. The content is editorial: long-form writing, project archive, personal bio. There is no commercial layer, no e-commerce, no ads. The site exists for two reasons: as a public credential anchor for the brand, and as the structural-fix sandbox for every methodology change Citable ships.

The starting position

The site started in the worst possible position any GEO playbook can address:

• Domain age: brand-new (no historical authority signal).
• Backlinks: zero (the owner had not done outreach).
• Brand mentions in the open web: roughly twenty, mostly in Spanish, mostly stale.
• Organic traffic from Google: under fifty sessions per month.
• AI search citations: zero across all four major surfaces (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews).
• Schema markup: none.
• robots.txt: default, blocking AI crawlers.
• Wikipedia / Wikidata entity: did not exist.

The interesting part is what was not going to fix this: no amount of writing more blog posts, no amount of “more backlinks,” no amount of social promotion. The site was structurally invisible. AI models could not extract anything from it because nothing was structured to be extracted, and they did not know what the entity “Fernando Angulo” referred to because there were thousands of other Fernando Angulos in the index with stronger entity signals.

This is the same starting position roughly 60% of small-business and founder clients arrive with. The diagnosis is identical. The fix sequence is identical.

What we did, in order — six months of structural work

Month 1 — Crawler access + Organization schema

The cheapest, highest-leverage first move. Updated robots.txt with explicit allows for ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and Google-Extended. Shipped Organization + Person schema on the homepage with full sameAs chain pointing to LinkedIn, X, GitHub, and the few professional profiles that existed. Validated through Schema.org and Google Rich Results.

Effect at month 1: Citable Checker score went from “untested” to 42 / 100, grade C. AI bot fetch logs started showing PerplexityBot and ChatGPT-User reading the site weekly.

Month 2 — Article + BreadcrumbList sitewide, content extractability rewrites

Added Article schema to every blog post. Added BreadcrumbList sitewide. Rewrote the opening 200 words of the homepage and the top six posts to lead with the direct answer in declarative sentences. Reformatted H2s into question-style headings matching the prompt patterns AI models actually retrieve against.

Effect at month 2: Score climbed to 51 / 100, grade C+. First citations appeared on Perplexity for the owner’s name + niche queries.

Month 3 — Wikidata entity creation

This is the slow lever and the most important one for entity disambiguation. We created a Wikidata entry for the site owner, sourced it carefully (sourced to independent media coverage, professional credentials, brand registration), and added the complete sameAs chain referencing the site, LinkedIn, GitHub, X, and Crunchbase.

Effect at month 3: Score moved to 58 / 100, grade B-. Gemini and AI Overviews began citing the site occasionally for niche queries. ChatGPT remained the slowest to update — it took until month 5 for the first ChatGPT citation.

Month 4 — llms.txt + FAQPage on cornerstone pages

Shipped /llms.txt at the root as an editorial map. Added FAQPage schema to the four cornerstone pages, with question text matching real AI prompts the owner’s audience types.

Effect at month 4: Score moved to 62 / 100, grade B. ChatGPT citations finally appeared (slowest surface, as predicted).

Months 5–6 — Maintenance + Wikipedia draft

The structural levers are exhausted at month 4. Months 5 and 6 have been about maintenance (re-running the 50-prompt audit monthly) and chipping at the hardest lever: Wikipedia notability. A stub article exists, but it does not meet the general-notability bar yet for promotion to a full article. This is the audit’s current “fail” — and it is the same fail almost every small operator runs into.

What the Checker says at day 180

The live result on fernandoangulo.com today:

• Score: 64 / 100 · grade B. “Above average, targeted work needed.”
• 3 signals passing: Organization schema, AI crawler access, Wikidata entity.
• 2 signals warning: Schema coverage (Person exists, Service does not — no commercial layer to support it), llms.txt depth (present but could be richer).
• 1 signal failing: Wikipedia article is a stub — the general-notability threshold has not been crossed yet.

This is the score profile of a well-executed, single-operator personal brand at the natural ceiling of what structural fixes alone can achieve. Crossing into A-grade territory from here requires the slow, expensive lever: earning enough independent media coverage to support a notability-compliant Wikipedia article. That is a 6-to-12-month arc, not a 30-day arc.

What this proves — and what it doesn’t

What it proves: the Citable methodology is not theatre. The same six structural levers it audits in client engagements are visible, measurable, and improvable on an advisor’s own site. Three out of six pass on a brand-new domain with no budget. The two warnings have clear paths forward. The one failure (Wikipedia) is the same failure every small operator hits — and it is the one we are most transparent with clients about.

What it does not prove: that GEO is easy. Six months of consistent structural work, executed by an advisor and associate of a GEO agency on their own site, gets to 64 / 100 — not 95 / 100. The remaining 36 points are the slow, expensive levers: brand authority, Wikipedia notability, deep llms.txt curation. Those compound over years.

What it means for client work: if you are a founder, consultant, or small operator wondering whether GEO is worth investing in: yes, the structural lift is real and accessible. The methodology gets you from invisible (Citable score 30 / 100 or lower) to “above average, targeted work needed” (60–70 range) inside 90–180 days, on almost any domain. From there, the curve flattens and authority work takes over. The Citable retainer is built around exactly this shape: foundations sprint first, authority arc second.

What we’re measuring next

Two open experiments on fernandoangulo.com through the rest of 2026:

1. Wikipedia notability arc — drafting a notability-compliant article with proper independent sourcing, pitching to relevant editors, tracking the time-to-approval. If this lands, we expect the Checker to cross into the 70s.
2. Quarterly re-audit cadence — re-running the full 50-prompt Share of Answer set quarterly to track decay vs growth on each surface. This is the same cadence we recommend to retainer clients.

Both will be published here as updates to this case study. The methodology is the report.