GEO is sold as a new discipline with new deliverables. The controlled research points somewhere less exciting: specific, verifiable, well-referenced writing. Here's what holds up and what doesn't.
llms.txt is pitched as the robots.txt of the AI era. Google says it ignores the file, and a 137,000-site study found 97% of them are never requested. Here's what the evidence shows and when it is still worth shipping.
AI Overviews are the AI-written summaries at the top of Google results. Here's the retrieval process behind them, what the click-through data actually shows, and the controls you really have.
AI bots split into three jobs — training, answer indexing, and fetching a page a user asked about — and blocking the wrong one costs you citations. A reference table and a robots.txt policy you can defend.
In March 2024, Interaction to Next Paint replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital. Here's what INP measures, the thresholds that matter, and how to fix a slow score.
Largest Contentful Paint should be 2.5 seconds or less. Here's what LCP measures, the four parts a slow score breaks into, and the fixes that actually move it.
A good CLS is 0.1 or less. Here's what causes the page to jump while it loads — images, ads, fonts, injected content — and how to hold everything in place.
Core Web Vitals are three metrics — LCP, INP, and CLS — that measure loading, responsiveness, and visual stability. Here's what each one means, the thresholds, and which to fix first.