Get found by Google.
And by AI.

Here is the honest 2026 picture. Google still drives the majority of discovery, so technical and on-page SEO remain non-negotiable. But a fast-growing share of questions never reaches a results page — they are answered inside an AI assistant that summarizes the web and names a handful of sources. If you are not one of those named sources, you are invisible in that conversation, no matter how well you "rank." Getting found now means doing both jobs well, and they share more foundation than most people think.

Technical SEO — the plumbing

This is whether engines can reach, render and index your pages at all. We check the load-bearing pieces:

• Crawlability & indexing — a sane robots.txt, a clean XML sitemap, correct canonical tags, no accidental noindex, no orphan pages, and a logical internal-link structure so crawlers can find everything.
• Core Web Vitals — Google's measured experience signals: LCP (largest contentful paint), INP (interaction to next paint, which replaced FID), and CLS (cumulative layout shift). Slow, janky pages get suppressed and frustrate people who do land.
• Mobile and rendering — Google indexes the mobile version of your site first. If content only appears after heavy JavaScript, or breaks on a phone, it may never be seen.
• HTTPS & site health — valid TLS, no broken links, no redirect chains, no mixed content. Security and findability overlap more than people expect — see our security & privacy grade.

Metadata & structured data

The signals that tell engines — and increasingly AI — exactly what a page is:

• Title tags & meta descriptions — unique, accurate, and written for a human deciding whether to click.
• Heading structure — one clear <h1> per page and a logical outline. Good structure is good for SEO, screen readers and AI extraction at the same time.
• Schema.org markup — Organization, Article, Product, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList and more, in JSON-LD. This is the bridge into AEO, so we cover it in depth below.

On-page, content & topical authority

Engines reward sites that are genuinely the best answer for a subject — not just a page stuffed with keywords:

• Search intent — does the page actually answer what the searcher meant, or just contain the words?
• Topical authority — a connected cluster of strong content around a theme beats a single thin page. Depth and internal linking signal genuine expertise.
• E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. Real authorship, citations, accurate facts and a credible "about" story increasingly matter — to Google's quality systems and to the AI engines that lean on the same trust signals. See how we grade.

AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) are two names for the same goal: be the source the machine quotes. It rests on classic SEO — an engine can only cite what it can crawl and trust — and then adds a layer of techniques aimed squarely at machine reading.

1 · Structured data, everywhere it fits

Schema is doing double duty in 2026. Beyond rich results, it hands AI engines an explicit, machine-readable statement of what your content is — who wrote it, what it answers, what it is about — instead of forcing them to infer it. Article, FAQPage, HowTo, Product and Organization markup all reduce ambiguity, and less ambiguity means a higher chance of being chosen as the citation.

2 · Direct answers & Q&A blocks

Answer the question in the first sentence, under a heading phrased the way a person would ask it. AI engines extract self-contained, quotable passages — so a clear "What is X? X is…" block is far more citable than the same fact buried three paragraphs down. Genuine FAQ sections (marked up with FAQPage) are some of the most-cited content on the web for exactly this reason.

3 · An llms.txt file

llms.txt is an emerging plain-text file at your domain root that gives large language models a clean, curated Markdown map of your most important pages — conceptually like robots.txt and sitemap.xml, but written for AI. It is a proposed convention, not a confirmed ranking factor, so we are honest about that. But it is cheap to publish and signals a site built to be read by machines. Houtos publishes one.

4 · Entity clarity & sameAs

AI engines reason about entities — distinct people, companies and products — not just keywords. Make yours unambiguous: one consistent name everywhere, Organization schema with a sameAs array linking to your authoritative profiles (GitHub, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Wikidata), and a clear "about" page. When an engine is confident who you are, it is far more willing to attribute an answer to you.

5 · Citable, verifiable statistics

Generative engines gravitate toward concrete, checkable facts: specific numbers, dates, named sources and original data. "Most sites are slow" is unquotable; "in our scans, the median site fails at least two Core Web Vitals" is a citation waiting to happen. Original statistics, clearly stated and dated, are among the strongest AEO assets you can own.

And keep the AI bots welcome

None of this works if your robots.txt blocks the crawlers that feed these engines — GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, ClaudeBot and others. Deciding which to allow is a real strategic choice (visibility versus content control), and we surface it rather than make it for you.

AEO is not a trick layered on top of SEO. It is what SEO becomes when your reader is a machine writing an answer for a human — clarity, structure and trust, made explicit.