Websites today need more than SEO to succeed. For the last decade or more, the focus has been on establishing best practices to ensure all the hard work that goes into building a website helps it perform well on search engines like Google, Bing, and others. This was the quintessential approach to bringing more users to your website.

Fast forward to 2025, while we should continue following and refining all the SEO best practices we’ve mastered over the years, we must now go further to ensure our websites perform well on AI tools 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 terms are often used interchangeably depending on how and where AI is used. Their goals overlap but differ slightly in intent. Bottom line is both are important to work towards.

We’ll focus on a few core strategies that impact AEO/GEO and how to navigate them, particularly for websites built on Sitecore.

Five Steps to Begin Your AEO/GEO Journey

1. Structured Data / Schema

Structured data remains critical. It should be refined to include context, entities, and location to help improving 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 large language models (LLMs) better understand your structure and content. There is lot of information available out there on what these files are and format on the same. A quick overview would be that these files are similar in concept to robots.txt, but, they are designed specifically for AI crawlers and large language models. Basically they tell AI systems which parts of website can be accessed, summarized or used for training.

4. Build Presence on Trusted Sources

Depending on your industry, ensure your brand appears on notable and credible platforms such as Reddit, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Instagram, Facebook, GitHub, and relevant tech publications/social platforms.

5. Performance, Core Web Vitals, and Metrics

Maintain excellent performance metrics like LCP, INP, CLS, TTFB, FCP, and SI to ensure smooth, fast-loading user experiences.

Continuing SEO Best Practices

Everything we’ve done for SEO remains vital: 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

Schema is paramount for AEO/GEO success. 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 Sitecore (SitecoreAI), most core data can be drawn from Sitecore properties. The key challenge lies in generating dynamic content like FAQs.

You can approach this in two ways:

• 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.

This ensures your schema remains current without additional effort from content authors or marketers.

Note: Depending on your content delivery setup (ISR, SSR or SSG), the first request to a page may take slightly longer if FAQ generation involves third-party systems. To mitigate this, consider caching at the edge or browser level, since the schema only changes when the page content does.

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 value credibility, or 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 for 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 these 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 it can grow large.

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 it is key factor for AI-driven credibility.

Always stay within ethical boundaries: avoid spamming and prioritize 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. One added note here is it’s best to keep a human in the loop to safeguard brand reputation.

5. 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:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) - Measures how quickly the main content of a page loads — important because users perceive a page as faster when its key elements appear quickly
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint) - Tracks how fast a page responds to user interactions like clicks or taps — crucial for ensuring a smooth, responsive experience.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) - Measures how much the layout moves around while loading — important because unexpected shifts frustrate users and hurt usability.

as well as supporting metrics like TTFB, FCP, and 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 Vercel).
• Caching is leveraged at all possible layers with latency in mind.

By embracing AEO and GEO best practices alongside SEO fundamentals, your website will be ready to thrive in a future where AI-driven discovery becomes the new normal.