Running AEO and GEO as a practice
How an SEO team adds AEO and GEO work without a new department: who owns what, the cadence, the audit loop, honest reporting, and what to stop doing.
How AI reads the web
Notes on answer engine optimization, generative visibility, and what actually moves the needle on a page.
Product pages that answer engines can quote
Making product pages quotable: spec tables in HTML, a direct answer to 'is X good for Y', Product and Offer JSON-LD, variants, and honest reviews.
When your CDN or firewall blocks bots robots.txt allows
How CDN bot-management settings and firewall rules override robots.txt for AI crawlers, how to detect it, and how to write an allow rule that holds.
Citability and entity signals: a GEO guide
The page-side half of GEO: citable sentences, authorship, entity clarity, honest dates, trust surfaces, and linking out, mapped to signals you can check.
JavaScript content and what never makes the trip
Which AI crawlers render JavaScript, which page patterns lose content on the way, and how to compare view-source against the rendered DOM on one page or a site.
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.