Query fan-out: why one question hits many of your pages
Google documents query fan-out in AI Overviews and AI Mode: one question becomes many searches. What it means for sub-questions, page scope and internal links.
fundamentals
16 posts
AEO for documentation sites
Documentation is already question-shaped. Task titles, a prose answer before the code, versioned URLs with clean canonicals, and where llms.txt fits.
Citability and entity signals: a GEO guide
The page-side half of GEO: citable sentences, authorship, entity clarity, honest dates, trust surfaces, and linking out, mapped to signals you can check.
Boilerplate ratio: how nav and footers shrink your page
Main-content extraction keeps one block of your page and drops the rest. How to measure what survives, by hand and across a site, and the markup that helps.
llms.txt: what it is, how it works, and whether to bother
Is llms.txt worth it? The proposal, the file format with a worked example, what is documented about who reads it, and when the afternoon pays off.
robots.txt patterns for AI: allow, block, and the middle
Four positions cover almost every site. The copy-paste file for each, the matching rules that quietly break them, and the maintenance the file needs.
FAQ sections: leverage or filler
The rich result that justified most FAQ blocks is gone. What still earns one, the test for whether a question belongs in the body, and what filler costs.
Tables and lists that survive extraction
Real markup is only half of it. What flattening does to a table lifted out of your page, and the four fixes that keep one readable on its own.
Chunking: why passages have to stand alone
A page is retrieved in pieces of a few hundred words. What splitting does to ordinary prose, and the three edits that make a section survive it.
What do AI crawlers extract from your page?
An element-by-element inventory of what AI crawlers keep, discard, and only conditionally read — plus the parts you can exclude on purpose.
Answer Engine Optimization: a page-level guide
What happens to a page between fetch and answer, the eight signals answer-readiness turns on, and how to check every one of them by hand and at scale.
SEO, AEO, and GEO: what actually changed
Three acronyms, one page. Here is what answer engines and generative search changed about optimization, and what they did not.