It's not 2010: make your public website GEO-ready
If your SEO playbook still looks like 2010 — keyword density, meta keywords, link exchanges — you're optimizing for a search engine that has largely moved on, and ignoring the AI answer engines that are quietly taking over discovery.
Here's a modern, practical checklist.
1. Lead with the answer
AI engines skim for the sentence that answers the question. Put a direct, one- or two-sentence answer right under a heading that mirrors the question. Save the throat-clearing for later.
2. Write quotable, self-contained claims
A good claim survives being lifted out of context. "Our SDK cuts integration time from days to under an hour" is quotable; "It's much faster now" is not.
3. Structure beats prose
Use real headings, short paragraphs, lists, and tables. Both crawlers and models reward clear structure — and so do humans.
4. Make the machine's job easy
- Valid, descriptive
<title>and meta description. - Schema.org structured data that names your entities.
- A clean
robots.txtthat allows AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) unless you have a reason not to. - Consider an
llms.txtsummarizing your site for models.
5. Don't break the fundamentals
Fast, mobile-friendly, crawlable pages with sane status codes. A model can't cite a page it can't fetch. Core Web Vitals still matter.
6. Measure it
Guessing isn't a strategy. Run a GEO audit to see your answerability and quotability scores, then fix the specific items flagged.
The web of 2026 rewards clarity, structure, and citability. Optimize for how machines and people actually read — not for a decade that's over.