SEO remains the foundation
Google does not describe a separate technical trick for appearing in AI answers. A page still needs to be crawlable, indexable and useful, with content that matches what its markup promises.
That does not make GEO a replacement for SEO. Google treats GEO and AEO as work on the same search experience. The brief does become sharper: publish information that genuinely improves an answer and clearly show who is responsible for it.
For Google, an llms.txt file, special AI markup and artificially chunked text provide no ranking benefit. Such a file may be useful for other systems, but it does not replace a crawlable page with strong content.
- One indexable URL per language
- Clear author and organisation details
- Internal links from relevant services and cases
- Visible content and structured data that say the same thing
Make knowledge verifiable
A generic overview is easy to replace. First-hand observations, concrete choices, local context and demonstrable project experience are not.
Name primary sources when a fact depends on them. Include publication and modification dates and visibly correct outdated information. This helps readers, search engines and AI systems assess provenance.
- Explain what you observed or tested yourself
- Separate facts, experience and opinion
- Link directly to primary documentation
- Update articles when the source changes
Measure visibility without theatre
Do not judge GEO by one isolated prompt. Look at organic traffic, branded searches, relevant landing pages, qualified enquiries and mentions in AI experiences when your measurement platform reports them.
Google now provides a dedicated generative AI performance report in Search Console. Use it as the source for visibility on Google and judge external measurement tools by their transparency, not by a promised secret score.
The best optimisation is still content that is useful without a search engine. If an article does not answer a real question, more schema will not save it.
Primary sources
The factual and technical claims in this article were checked against these sources.
