GEO/AEO: technical SEO's newest dialect

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) get talked about like a new field. Mostly, they’re the same fundamentals technical SEOs have practiced for years — applied to a reader that isn’t a ranking algorithm, but a language model deciding what to cite.

What actually changed

• Entity clarity matters more, not less. Structured data and unambiguous naming help a model resolve who or what a page is about.
• Structure beats keyword density. Clear headings, direct answers near the top, and well-scoped sections are what get lifted into a generated answer.
• Crawlability and rendering still gate everything. If a model’s retrieval layer can’t fetch or parse your page, none of the above matters.

What didn’t change

The sites that show up in AI-generated answers are, overwhelmingly, the same sites that were already technically sound: fast, crawlable, well-structured, and clear about what they are. GEO/AEO is less a new skill set and more a reason to finally fix the technical debt that was always worth fixing.