Every SEO tool homepage in 2026 now says “AEO & GEO”. Most of them mean: we added three extra rows to the report. The underlying work is older than the acronyms.
1. Do not block the machines you want citations from
Check /robots.txt for sitewide Disallow: / under GPTBot, Google-Extended, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot. Cloudflare’s “block AI crawlers” toggle is the usual culprit. If you want to be quoted, allow those user-agents on public pages. You can still disallow training-only bots if that is a legal choice.
2. Put extractable answers on the page
AI Overviews and featured snippets prefer a question heading and a two-to-four sentence answer immediately below it. FAQPage JSON-LD that matches visible text helps. Hidden FAQ markup that users never see is a good way to get ignored.
3. Make the entity obvious
Organization or Person JSON-LD, a unique About page, and (if your name is contested) an llms.txt that states who you are not. Models collapse similar brand names. You have to separate them in crawlable text.
4. Be worth quoting
None of the above beats a thin page. Citation engines prefer specific, dated, first-hand explanations over generic “10 tips” lists. Write the page you would want an answer engine to steal from — then make it easy to steal accurately.
Run the checks
The AEO / GEO checker flags crawler blocks, missing llms.txt, missing FAQ/question structure and missing Organization/Person markup. Pair it with the full SEO checker so you are not celebrating AI readiness on a noindexed page.