SEO and GEO
SEO gets a page ranked in a list of links. GEO gets your facts into the answer an AI assistant writes, ideally with a citation back to you. Assistants that search the web fetch a handful of pages, read them and summarise. So the question changes from "will I rank?" to "when the assistant reads my page, can it lift a correct, self-contained answer?"
The checklist I used on this site
I rebuilt baraa.si with GEO in mind. Here is what that meant in practice.
- Every page is plain HTML. Many AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. The site is built ahead of time, so every word is in the page source.
- Crawlers are welcome. robots.txt lets search and AI crawlers in. Bing's index matters more than people think, because it feeds Copilot and other assistants' web search.
- One identity, everywhere. The same name, title, photo and bio on the site, LinkedIn and GitHub, linked to each other. Structured data (JSON-LD) on every page describes one Person with a fixed ID and lists the other names I'm known by, so search engines merge everything into one entity.
- Answer first. Each page opens with one or two sentences that directly answer the obvious question. Those sentences are what gets quoted.
- Specific, checkable numbers. "A 7B model came close to 70B quality" or "1,089 of 1,089 official test vectors passed" get repeated; "highly efficient" doesn't.
- Visible FAQs. Questions written the way people ask them, with short answers, on the About page and every project page.
- Both languages, properly linked. The English and Arabic version of each page point to each other (hreflang), so people searching in either language find the right one.
- A plain-text fact sheet. /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt summarise the site for AI tools. It's an experimental convention, not a ranking factor, but it costs nothing to keep.
- Fast, accessible pages. They're easier to crawl and better for whoever clicks through from an answer.
How to check it's working
Ask the assistants directly, in every language you care about: "Who is …?", "Who built …?", "What is …?". Note what they get wrong, then fix the page they most likely read. Watch Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to see which pages are indexed.
What GEO is not
It isn't stuffing pages with keywords for chatbots or hiding text for crawlers. Assistants reward the same things readers do: clear, true, specific pages from a source that is consistent about who it is.