SEO Geo

seo-geo — make one page findable in Google AND in AI answers

One audited page, two surfaces. You take an existing URL and make it rank in Google's blue links / AI Overviews and earn citations in ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Gemini — through meta, schema, answer-first structure, and a clean technical audit. You do not write the article body and you do not pick the keywords. That work belongs upstream.

When to use / When NOT to use

Use when the request is about a concrete artifact:

• "Audit this page for SEO" / "why isn't this ranking?" / "make this page rank."
• "Get us cited in ChatGPT / Perplexity / AI Overviews" / "optimize for AI search."
• "Add schema markup" / "write the JSON-LD for this article/product."
• "Our Core Web Vitals are failing" / crawlability / "should we block GPTBot?"

Do NOT use — redirect instead:

The load-bearing distinction: content-engine decides what to write and which keywords to target (upstream strategy); you optimize the specific page that exists. performance owns why a render is slow; you only measure Core Web Vitals against the p75 thresholds, flag a fail, and hand off the fix.

The one rule both surfaces share

Answer the primary query completely in the first ~40–200 words. Everything below is downstream of this. Why: Google extracts that opening for featured snippets and AI Overviews, and the Princeton GEO study (KDD 2024, 10k queries across 8 domains) found answer-first, source-cited content is what AI engines lift into their answers — not buried prose. If the page makes a reader scroll past an intro to reach the answer, no amount of schema saves it.

There is no separate "AI SEO" toggle for Google. AI Overviews and AI Mode run on the same Googlebot crawl, the same rendering, the same ranking, and the same E-E-A-T / helpful-content signals (folded into core ranking in March 2024). Good page experience and distinguishable main content serve both surfaces at once. Treat them as one job.

1. On-page SEO pass

• Title ≤ 60 chars, primary query near the front. Past ~60 chars Google truncates it.
• Meta description ≤ 160 chars that earns the click — it is not a ranking factor, it is the ad copy for the result.
• Exactly one <h1>, then a logical <h2>/<h3> hierarchy that mirrors search intent (the sub-questions a searcher actually has).
• Internal links with descriptive anchors ("Core Web Vitals thresholds", not "click here") — anchor text is an entity signal both Google and AI engines read.

<!-- Bad: vague, query buried, no length discipline -->
<title>Home | Our Awesome Company - Welcome to the Best Site Ever for You</title>
<meta name="description" content="We are a company. Learn more about us here today.">

<!-- Good: query first, within limits, earns the click -->
<title>Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP &amp; CLS Thresholds (2026)</title>
<meta name="description"
  content="The exact LCP, INP, and CLS pass thresholds Google uses at the p75 field
  percentile — plus how to check yours in 2 minutes.">

2. Schema / JSON-LD — ship the live types, never the dead ones

Pick from the live column. Shipping a deprecated type is dead markup: it renders nothing and signals carelessness. The single highest-value guard in this skill is not emitting a dead @type.

Validate every block with the Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator (validator.schema.org) before shipping. Copy-paste blocks with required-vs-recommended props and the full dead-types list are in references/schema-recipes.md.

3. GEO pass — the measured citation levers

The Princeton GEO study quantified what moves source content into AI answers. Apply these as concrete edits — they are not vibes, they are deltas measured on GEO-bench:

• Cited sources inline (~+30% visibility) — link to authoritative origins for claims.
• Statistics (~+32%) — one verifiable number per ~150–200 words, with its source.
• Quotations (~+41%, the biggest lever) — quote a named expert or primary document.
• Fluency (~+28%) — clean, readable prose. Keyword stuffing did NOT help in the study; stuffing is pure cost.
• Freshness — update real content and dateModified. Recency is a genuine AI-source signal; a stale-looking page is corroborated less.
• Entity corroboration — earn mentions on independent authoritative domains so AI engines can cross-check who you are. This is the off-page half of GEO.

Why it is no longer optional: a citation in an AI Overview can lift CTR 80%+, while AI Overviews are compressing classic organic CTR (Gartner projected ~25% organic-traffic decline by 2026). GEO runs alongside on-page SEO, never instead of it.

Myth callout — llms.txt. Do not sell llms.txt as a ranking or AI-visibility signal. Google (Illyes, Mueller) does not use it and likened it to the long-ignored keywords meta tag; the major AI crawlers overwhelmingly skip /llms.txt and crawl HTML directly. AI access is governed by robots.txt + real on-page authority, not a root text file. Spending effort there is the modern keyword-meta-tag mistake.

4. Technical audit — measure, flag, hand off

Core Web Vitals (thresholds unchanged since INP replaced FID in March 2024):

A URL passes only if ≥75% of real visits hit "good" at the p75 of the CrUX field dataset. Lab tools (Lighthouse) estimate; CrUX / field decides. A green Lighthouse score with a failing CrUX p75 is still a fail. Measure and flag here — hand the actual render-path fix to performance (and to ../nextjs/SKILL.md for App Router apps). Do not guess at LCP fixes in this skill.

Crawlability / indexability: correct <link rel="canonical">, a referenced sitemap.xml, no stray noindex/Disallow on the page you want ranked, robots.txt present and intentional.

AI-bot access (per purpose): robots.txt controls AI crawlers separately by purpose, and the choice has visibility consequences.

• Blocking the search bot (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot) removes you from that engine's citations. Block only the training bot (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot) if you want citations but not training-corpus use.
• Google-Extended opts out of Google AI training — but AI Overviews are served by ordinary Googlebot, so you cannot opt out of AI Overviews without leaving Search.

The full 2026 user-agent table and robots.txt templates are in references/ai-crawler-control.md.

5. The audit checklist (the artifact you emit)

Emit this as a pass/fail list per page. This is what scripts/verify.sh lints.

• <title> ≤ 60 chars, query near front; meta description ≤ 160.
• Exactly one <h1>; H2/H3 hierarchy matches intent.
• Primary query answered in the first ~40–200 words.
• JSON-LD: valid JSON, has @context + @type, no dead type, validates in Rich Results Test.
• ≥2 GEO levers present (statistic / quotation / cited source / fluency).
• CWV stated at p75 field thresholds, with pass/fail + handoff note if failing.
• canonical + sitemap correct; no accidental noindex.
• robots.txt does not block a search bot while the page claims AI visibility.

Anti-patterns

Handoff

When the audit hits a boundary, name the owner and stop:

• Keywords, clusters, briefs, "what should we write?" → content-engine.
• The actual article/body draft → ../article-writing/SKILL.md.
• Persuasive value-prop / CTA copy → landing-copy.
• Fixing a CWV fail (render, hydration, bundle) → performance.
• Wiring generateMetadata / sitemap route / app-router SEO → ../nextjs/SKILL.md.
• WAI-ARIA / contrast / keyboard a11y → accessibility.
• Measuring traffic / GA4 / Search Console dashboards after → analytics.