Traditional website optimization focused on human experience and SEO for search bots. A third pillar is now essential: optimizing for AI advisory tools and recommendation engines through structured data like product feeds and APIs.

Websites now have a dual purpose. A significant portion of your content must be created specifically for AI agents—niche, granular, and structured for LLM consumption to improve AEO. The human-facing part must then evolve to offer deeper, more interactive experiences, as visitors will arrive with their basic research already completed by AI.

Instead of guessing how to make your site more compatible with new AI browsers, directly ask the AI itself. Prompt ChatGPT with your URL and ask what changes are needed on your site to ensure the right answers appear when users search with the Atlas browser.

Don't abandon SEO for GEO. LLMs rely on the same crawling and indexing systems as traditional search engines. To be cited by AI, you must first have strong SEO fundamentals like fast load times and structured data. GEO then builds on this by focusing on answering specific user questions.

Don't overcomplicate technical Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). The most impactful factors are the same as in SEO: strong internal links, proper schema markup, and ensuring LLMs can crawl your page. Hyped tactics like `LLMs.txt` are currently ineffective and not used by major search engines.

The first step to influencing AI is ensuring your website is technically sound for LLMs to crawl and index. This revives the importance of technical audits, log file analysis, and tools like Screaming Frog to identify and remove barriers preventing AI crawlers from accessing your content.

Technical structure is crucial for AI Search Optimization (AEO). An article with properly ordered HTML headings (H1, H2, H3) is three times more likely to be cited by an LLM compared to a similar Page 1 ranking article with poor structure, making it a critical, low-effort optimization.

SEO is evolving beyond search engines to include Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Brands must now practice "Generative Engine Optimization" (GEO), ensuring their site is properly coded and marked up so AI can accurately crawl, understand, and recommend their products in generative responses.

New AI-powered browsers struggle to index content locked in PDFs. To ensure your information is discoverable and summarized correctly by these tools, you must replicate gated content in standard, scannable HTML on your website.