Every conversation about GEO and AEO eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable fact: none of it works if the technical foundation underneath is broken. An LLM can't cite a page it can't access. Google can't feature a snippet from a page it hasn't indexed cleanly. A slow, unstable site erodes trust with humans and machines equally. Technical SEO isn't a legacy checkbox - it's the floor everything else is built on.
Crawlability & Indexation
- Robots.txt doesn't accidentally block important sections, and now explicitly considers AI crawlers (GPTBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot) rather than only classic search bots.
- XML sitemaps are current, submitted, and free of noindexed or redirected URLs.
- Internal linking gives every important page at least one clear path from the homepage - orphaned pages get crawled less and trusted less.
- Canonical tags resolve consistently, with no chains or conflicting signals across parameters and duplicate URLs.
Core Web Vitals & Page Experience
- Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds on real-world mobile connections, not just lab conditions.
- Cumulative Layout Shift kept near zero by reserving space for images, embeds, and ads before they load.
- Interaction responsiveness tested on mid-range mobile devices, not just the developer's desktop.
- Images served in modern formats (WebP/AVIF) with explicit width and height attributes to prevent shift.
Structured Data as the Entity Layer
- Organization and/or Person schema present and consistent with your Google Business Profile and social profiles.
- Article, Product, or Service schema matched precisely to on-page content - no fields describing something the page doesn't actually say.
- Breadcrumb schema reinforcing site structure for both search engines and AI crawlers trying to understand hierarchy.
- Validated in Google's Rich Results Test and Schema.org's validator, not just assumed correct because a plugin generated it.
Content Architecture for Machines and Humans
A clean heading hierarchy (one H1, logically nested H2/H3s) does double duty: it helps human scanners find what they need, and it gives both classic search algorithms and generative models a reliable map of what each section of the page is actually about. Flat, unstructured walls of text force every downstream system - human or machine - to work harder to extract meaning.
Technical SEO is the plumbing. GEO and AEO are what you build on top of it. Skip the plumbing and the building doesn't stay up.
The 20-Point Audit
In practice, a full technical audit walks through indexation status page-by-page, Core Web Vitals field data from real users, structured data coverage across every template type, redirect chains, mobile usability, HTTPS and security headers, log file analysis to see how crawlers actually behave on the site, and a content-duplication check across near-identical pages. Running this before any GEO or AEO initiative ensures the visibility gains from that work aren't quietly being capped by a technical ceiling underneath it.