AEO GEO Optimization Guide

The problem this solves

Here's the thing. You don't have time to become an expert in answer engine optimization. You've got a business to run. But you also can't afford to quietly disappear from the place people are starting to ask their questions.

So you're stuck between two bad options: ignore it and hope, or fall down a rabbit hole of jargon written by people who'd rather sound smart than be useful.

This guide is the third option. The technical reality, translated into a short list of things you can actually do — most of them this week, most of them free.

What's inside

No fluff, no forty-page setup. Six short sections, each ending with one concrete thing to do:

• What actually changed — and the half of your old SEO work that still counts (more than you think).
• How AI tools “read” you — in plain English, with the analogy nobody else bothers to use.
• The three writing habits that make your pages quotable — and that happen to make them better for humans too.
• Where to show up when your own website isn't enough anymore.
• The boring technical settings that can hide you from AI completely — and how to know if you're caught in one.
• How to tell if any of it's working when the traffic won't show up in your analytics.

Plus a one-page cheat sheet — the whole thing boiled down to the five moves that matter, in order. The part you'll screenshot.

You run a real business. You've got a website that more or less works. You keep hearing you're supposed to “do something about AI” and nobody will tell you what, in words you use.

You don't want a course. You don't want a webinar funnel. You want the straight version, once.

Why me

I've been building and fixing websites since the mid-'90s. Thirty years of watching the acronyms change — SEO, then AEO, then GEO, and whatever's next — while the actual job stayed the same: figure out what matters, ignore what doesn't, and tell you the difference without the performance.

That's the whole guide. The signal, with the noise left out.

I write about this work on Substack, in a newsletter called Unhidden. And I wrote a book about how all the pieces of an online presence fit together, called Digital Coherence. This guide is the AI chapter of that same story.