_____ THE GEO PLAYBOOK
Technical GEO: Laying the foundations for visibility
Behind every successful GEO strategy is a solid technical setup.
As a leading GEO agency, we’ve seen that the biggest gains often start with getting the basics right - ensuring your site is crawlable, structured, and easy for AI systems to interpret. The same as traditional search engines.
If AI crawlers can’t reach or interpret your pages, your content will never be considered for citation.
We treat technical GEO as the foundation for everything that follows, ensuring every brand we work with is technically discoverable, readable, and trusted by AI systems.
Keeping technical foundations in place
Technical SEO remains the bedrock of GEO. Strong technical hygiene gives AI models confidence in your content, ensuring they can read, understand, and reuse it accurately.
To make it possible for AI crawlers such as GPTBot and CCBot to access, parse, and trust your content, you must:
Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt
Make sure bots like GPTBot, Bing’s Bingbot, and Anthropic’s CCBot are not disallowed. If you block them, your content cannot be used for citations.
Maintain fast page speed
Compress images, streamline scripts and use a reliable CDN to keep pages fast and accessible. Faster pages improve crawlability and user trust.
Keep data accurate and consistent
Conflicting statistics or outdated numbers reduce credibility. Regularly update key figures across your site and metadata.
Ensure proper canonicalisation
Use consistent metadata, canonicals, and hreflang tags to prevent duplicates and mixed signals.
Use structured schema
Apply FAQ, HowTo, Article, and Review schema where relevant so models can easily identify context and entities.
Beyond structured data, also think about how your brand and expertise are described. Techniques like context wrapping help AI systems connect your content with the right topics and attributes, reinforcing your authority beyond metadata alone.
For larger or international sites, technical GEO also involves ensuring localisation signals are clear. Consistent hreflang and structured data across regions help AI models understand where your expertise applies geographically.
A practical framework to start
If you’re setting up GEO for the first time, focus on three clear priorities this quarter. These actions establish your technical baseline before deeper content or PR optimisation begins.
Month 1: Audit and access
- Confirm that AI user agents are allowed and log requests from GPTBot and Bingbot.
- Crawl your site to identify blocked pages or redirect loops.
- Benchmark page-speed scores and Core Web Vitals to prioritise fixes.
Month 2: Structure and schema
- Add or validate schema markup across top-traffic templates (Article, FAQ, Product).
- Test markup in Google’s Rich Results tool and validate for errors.
- Write concise, factual metadata that AI systems can easily reuse when summarising your pages.
Month 3: Measure and maintain
- Configure GA4 and Looker filters to track referrals from chat.openai.com, bing.com, and perplexity.ai.
- Schedule quarterly technical reviews to maintain crawl health and data freshness.
- Align technical insights with your content and PR teams so updates reinforce each other.
- Validate that any published statistics or datasets remain accurate and date-stamped.
These steps create the groundwork for measurable GEO performance and make it easier to attribute AI visibility gains later.
Technical readiness is only part of the picture. To understand how AI interprets and surfaces your content, our guide to generative AI explains how large language models process structure, schema and authority - the foundations of strong GEO performance.
Read more
How AI-ready is your brand?
Here is everything you need to get started with GEO. Use these resources to check the essentials, build a plan, and benchmark your AI visibility.
Download the LLM checklist
Review on-site, off-site and technical readiness. It highlights crawler access, schema, data freshness and trust signals so you can spot quick fixes.
Get the 90-day GEO roadmap
Follow a phased plan that turns foundations into delivery across technical, on-site and off-site work - like AiPR - with simple milestones your team can own.
Find out what’s holding your visibility back.
Book a GEO audit
If you’re planning to bring in outside expertise to strengthen your technical foundations, our guide on how to choose a GEO agency explains how to assess experience, methodology and results in this emerging area of search.
Where next?
Read our guide to on-site GEO, where we explore how to structure and write content that AI systems understand and reuse. Or head back to the previous page on the AI search landscape.
Back to the GEO playbook homepage
