How to Structure Content for AI Search Discovery
Jul 14, 2025 • 6 Minute Read • Tod Szewczyk, VP, Marketing Services
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How to Jumpstart Your AEO & GEO Strategy for AI-Optimized Websites
Jan 23, 2026 • 7 Minute Read • Deepthi Katta, Technical Director
Search visibility requires more than traditional SEO. For the last decade or more, the focus has been on establishing best practices to ensure that all the hard work invested in building a website helps it perform well on search engines like Google, Bing, and others.
This approach was quintessential for bringing more traffic to your website.
Fast forward to today, while we should continue to follow and refine all the SEO best practices we’ve mastered over the years, we must now go further to ensure our websites perform well on generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others.
This shift introduces new opportunities for web development teams to pursue AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) to keep brands and companies relevant in this new era of information discovery.
Both AEO and GEO terms are often used interchangeably, depending on the context and application of AI. Their goals overlap but differ slightly in intent. Bottom line is that both are important to work towards.
In this article, we outline practical, high-impact strategies to support AEO and GEO, with a particular focus on how teams can implement efficiently on Sitecore-based websites, including:
- How AEO and GEO extend traditional SEO for AI-driven discovery.
- The five most impactful steps to improve AI visibility today.
- How to implement AEO/GEO efficiently using Sitecore and modern headless architectures.
What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): A strategy focused on optimizing content to be displayed as a direct answer in search engines (like Google's AI Overviews or featured snippets) and to voice assistants. AEO involves using structured data, such as schema markup for FAQs and how-to guides, to help AI understand and extract answers, making content more prominent and directly accessible.
The goal of AEO is to appear as the answer or top answer to a user's question, thereby reducing clicks on the website while increasing visibility through direct citations.
What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): A strategy focused on optimizing content to be cited, referenced, or surfaced within generative AI engines (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini) as part of AI-generated responses. GEO involves publishing AI-friendly content that's clear, authoritative, and widely distributed across trusted sources, so that large language models (LLMs) can easily interpret, summarize, and attribute it.
The goal of GEO is to ensure accurate representation and increase brand visibility and authority by being cited in AI-generated search results.
5 Steps to Build Your AEO & GEO Strategy
1. Structured Data and Schema
Structured data remains critical. It should be refined to include context, entities, and location to help improve visibility across SEO, AEO, and GEO.
Incorporate FAQs or natural-language sections on high-traffic pages or those where you want to direct traffic.
2. Metadata Enhancements for Credibility (E-E-A-T)
Strengthen your metadata to support Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T), which are essential factors for AI and search credibility.
3. Add llms.txt and llms-full.txt
Include these files on your website to help LLMs better understand your structure and content. There is a lot of information available on what these files are and their format.
A quick overview would be that these files are similar in concept to robots.txt, but they're designed specifically for AI crawlers and LLMs. Essentially, they instruct AI systems on which parts of the website can be accessed, summarized, or utilized for training purposes.
4. Build Presence on Trusted Sources
Depending on your industry, ensure your brand appears on notable and credible platforms, such as Reddit, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Instagram, Facebook, GitHub, and relevant tech publications/social platforms.
5. Performance, Core Web Vitals, and Metrics
Maintain excellent performance metrics, including LCP, INP, CLS, TTFB, FCP, and SI, to ensure smooth and fast-loading user experiences.
Continuing SEO Best Practices That Support AEO & GEO
Everything we’ve done for SEO remains vital, including page speed, Core Web Vitals, crawlability, metadata quality, accessibility, URL consistency, canonicalization, and more.
Now, let’s explore how to implement the strategies above efficiently, ideally in a way that automates processes and minimizes effort for marketing teams. Many companies have leaner teams today, and if a task requires too much ongoing effort after setup, it’s unlikely to be completed consistently.
1. Schema — The Foundation
The schema is paramount for the success of AEO and GEO. For optimal results:
- Include FAQs based on page content, alongside traditional elements such as headings, descriptions, images, and breadcrumbs.
- Implement JSON-LD templates (typically one per page template) that align with your ISR setup, ensuring schema data stays up to date with the content.
In SitecoreAI, most core data can be derived from Sitecore properties. The key challenge lies in generating dynamic content, such as FAQs.
You can approach this in two ways to ensure your schema remains current without additional effort from content authors or marketers:
- Use Sitecore Stream AI via API to generate FAQs based on page content.
- Or leverage another LLM within your codebase to generate this dynamic content automatically.
2. Metadata and Credibility (E-E-A-T)
Metadata has long been a cornerstone of search optimization, and it’s equally important for AEO. AI platforms prioritize credibility, also known as E-E-A-T. Ensure your schema, particularly for articles, blogs, or news pages, includes citation and author details.
Where appropriate, display E-E-A-T elements on the page author bios, sources, case studies, and relevant external links. Avoid clutter, but always aim for transparency and credible backlinks.
From a Sitecore perspective, design page templates that support this out of the box:
- Include author bio sections for content-heavy pages.
- Add supporting content blocks, such as related case studies or reference links.
- Use dynamic schema pulls from JSON-LD templates to maintain efficiency and minimize manual effort.
3. Implementing llms.txt and llms-full.txt
Adding the llms.txt and llms-full.txt files is one of the simplest yet impactful steps. LLMs thrive on structured, organized data.
Rather than static files like robots.txt, these should be served as dynamic endpoints, for instance, using Next.js to create route handlers that render these files.
Best practices:
- Cache these responses well, as they rarely change.
- Pay special attention to llms-full.txt, as the file can grow large and may cause other issues, such as maintainability or site performance.
4. Building Presence on Trusted Sources
This is one of the most exciting areas, with numerous implementation possibilities. The goal is to strengthen your brand’s presence across trusted external platforms as this is a key factor for AI-driven credibility.
Always stay within ethical boundaries by avoiding spamming and prioritizing authenticity and freshness.
Example use case: If you’re developing a corporate website for a company with a strong LinkedIn presence, you could automate cross-posting.
- When a new blog post is published, automatically create and share a shortened version on LinkedIn or X.
- Use Sitecore Connect to trigger workflows on content publish events.
- Alternatively, use external workflow tools like N8N, which allow easy visual automation.
These workflows can even integrate LLMs to generate post summaries.
Tip: It’s best to keep a human in the loop as a reviewer to safeguard the brand's reputation.
5. Site Performance — The Universal Priority
Performance is everything in the web ecosystem. Neither AI tools, users, nor search engines favor slow-loading pages.
Your website should maintain strong Core Web Vitals, such as:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) - Measures how quickly the main content of a page loads, which is important because users perceive a page as faster when its key elements appear quickly.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) - Tracks how quickly a page responds to user interactions, such as clicks or taps, which is crucial for ensuring a smooth and responsive experience.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - Measures how much the layout moves around while loading, which is important because unexpected shifts frustrate users and hurt usability.
Additional supporting metrics include Time to First Byte (TTFB), First Contentful Paint (FCP), and Speed Index (SI). You can read more about these metrics here.
While platform or tech stack constraints may sometimes limit optimization, follow this rule of thumb:
- Avoid unnecessary animations and prioritize fast, responsive interactions.
For headless implementations, ensure:
- JSON payloads remain under 128KB (as recommended by our partner, Vercel).
- Caching is leveraged at all possible layers with latency in mind.
Positioning Your Website for Long-Term AI Visibility
As AI-driven discovery becomes a core part of how users find information, organizations must adapt to how they structure, optimize, and maintain their websites.
Working alongside SEO, your AEO and GEO strategy will build on the foundation to ensure content is accessible, credible, and usable by modern AI systems. To position your website for long-term visibility across both search engines and generative AI tools, focus on:
- Strengthening structured data
- Improving credibility signals
- Adopting emerging AI crawling standards
- Expanding presence across trusted platforms
- Improving performance and Core Web Vitals
The most successful AEO and GEO strategies are those that scale. When implemented thoughtfully—using automation, templates, and platform-native capabilities—these practices can deliver lasting impact without adding friction for marketing or development teams.
If your team needs help preparing and optimizing your website, our complimentary GEO and SEO assessment can help identify where your content ranks, how it’s interpreted, and how well it performs across both search and AI-driven results.