Do the fundamentals exceptionally well: make pages crawlable, answer real customer questions clearly, use descriptive page titles and internal links, publish original expert content, keep business information consistent and add structured data that matches what people can see on the page.
First: stop treating SEO, AEO and GEO as three unrelated websites
Search behaviour is changing, but the strongest foundation is still a useful site with clear entities, trustworthy information and pages that answer real questions. Google’s own current guidance says its generative AI search features are rooted in core Search ranking and quality systems.
That means the work is less exotic than the acronyms make it sound.
SEO: make the site understandable and discoverable
- One clear purpose for each page
- Useful title and meta description
- Descriptive headings and internal links
- Fast, mobile-friendly pages
- Canonical URLs, robots.txt and XML sitemap
- Original content built from real business knowledge
AEO: answer the question before making the reader hunt
Put concise answers near the top of important service pages. Use the language customers use. Follow with the detail, examples, constraints and FAQs that prove you understand the question rather than simply repeating keywords.
GEO: give AI systems clear, reliable source material
Generative systems benefit from the same clarity: explicit company information, clear service definitions, geographic relevance, authorship, structured data and original explanations that are worth citing. Do not create dozens of thin pages that say the same thing with a different suburb name.
Structured data helps machines understand the page
Use Organization, Service, Breadcrumb and Article markup where it accurately describes visible content. Structured data is not a ranking coupon. It is a machine-readable description of what the page already says.
What we are not doing
We are not stuffing invisible keywords, manufacturing fake location pages or promising an “AI ranking.” We are also not treating llms.txt as a Google requirement; Google’s current AI-search guidance explicitly says special AI text files are not needed for its generative Search features.
What to measure
Use Google Search Console for impressions, clicks, indexed pages and query performance. Use Bing Webmaster Tools for Bing visibility and URL discovery. Connect this to business outcomes: calls, WhatsApp enquiries, direction requests and leads.
Official references: Google’s generative AI search guidance, Google structured data guidance, and Bing Webmaster Guidelines.