A practical GEO checklist for your website

Ten changes that make your site easier for search engines and AI answer engines to read, understand and cite. None are magic; together they remove the common blockers. New to the idea? Start with what GEO is.

Technical

1. Make sure your content is in the HTML

View source on your key pages. If the text isn’t there (because it’s loaded by JavaScript), some crawlers won’t see it. Prefer server-rendered or static output for important pages.

2. Don’t block the crawlers you want

Check robots.txt and any CDN/firewall bot rules. Decide deliberately which search and AI crawlers are allowed, and confirm your key pages return a normal 200 response to them.

3. Publish a sitemap and canonical URLs

A clean sitemap.xml and one canonical URL per page avoid duplicate-content confusion.

Structure

4. Add Organization schema

State your name, URL, logo, contact details and profile links in JSON-LD on the home page:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Your Firm",
  "url": "https://www.example.com",
  "sameAs": ["https://www.linkedin.com/company/your-firm"]
}

5. Mark up people, services, FAQs and articles

Use Person for named experts, Service or Product for offerings, FAQPage for real FAQs and Article for guides. Markup must match what’s visible on the page.

6. Add an llms.txt (optional but cheap)

A short Markdown file at /llms.txt summarising who you are and listing key pages. It’s a community proposal, not a guaranteed ranking factor — treat it as a low-cost clarity exercise. The free tool generates one.

Content

7. Lead with the answer

Open each page and section with a direct, factual statement: what you do, for whom, where. Then add detail.

8. Write passages that stand alone

Engines often quote a single paragraph. Make sure each one names its subject and doesn’t depend on a heading or earlier text for meaning.

9. Show real expertise

Named authors with credentials, original data, case studies and links to primary sources give models and humans a reason to trust you.

10. Be consistent off-site

Align your name, description and services across LinkedIn, directories, review sites and press. Inconsistency dilutes the signal.

Then measure

Write 20–30 questions your customers really ask. Run them across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google monthly, and log whether you’re mentioned, how you’re described and which sources are cited. Expect noise; look for the trend.

Want help? See how an audit works or contact me.