SEO, AEO, and GEO: what actually changed
Three acronyms, one page. Here is what answer engines and generative search changed about optimization, and what they did not.
How AI reads the web
Notes on answer engine optimization, generative visibility, and what actually moves the needle on a page.
How to audit a site for AEO and GEO
The full AEO and GEO audit loop: access, extraction, answer-readiness, citability and entity, then measurement. By hand, at scale, and re-crawled to prove it.
Boilerplate ratio: how nav and footers shrink your page
Main-content extraction keeps one block of your page and drops the rest. How to measure what survives, by hand and across a site, and the markup that helps.
Freshness signals and honest dateModified
What datePublished and dateModified mean, what Google's date guidance asks for, why a bumped date is a trust failure, and how to audit dates across a site.
llms.txt: what it is, how it works, and whether to bother
Is llms.txt worth it? The proposal, the file format with a worked example, what is documented about who reads it, and when the afternoon pays off.
Prioritizing AEO fixes: severity × page value
A reproducible way to order AEO and GEO fixes: rate severity, page value, and effort in a spreadsheet, rank the list, then re-crawl to prove each fix landed.
Status codes, redirects, and canonical drift on AI surfaces
How redirect chains, soft 404s, 4xx and 5xx responses, and conflicting canonicals decide which URL gets fetched, indexed, and attributed — and how to check.
Training vs. retrieval crawlers: the block decision
Should you block GPTBot? Which AI agents train, which search, which fetch for a user, what each block costs, and four robots.txt policies to copy.
What GEOBee measures, and what it deliberately doesn't
What GEOBee's three lenses score, why the results are local and re-runnable, and what it does not measure: citations, prompt visibility, or rankings.
What makes a page citable: stats, sources, quotable blocks
What the GEO research paper tested, what it found, and where it stops — then how to write citable sentences and count them across a site.
robots.txt patterns for AI: allow, block, and the middle
Four positions cover almost every site. The copy-paste file for each, the matching rules that quietly break them, and the maintenance the file needs.
FAQ sections: leverage or filler
The rich result that justified most FAQ blocks is gone. What still earns one, the test for whether a question belongs in the body, and what filler costs.
Tables and lists that survive extraction
Real markup is only half of it. What flattening does to a table lifted out of your page, and the four fixes that keep one readable on its own.