GEO has become the priority so how do you optimize for it, technically?

Let’s get right into it, I am not going to bother explaining what technical SEO is. If you are new to SEO, you should read this before you ready my blog post. I have seen a lot of content on Linked in illustrating and highlighting the differences between SEO and GEO when it comes to content optimization, and that is important. However, if you have a website that is above 10k pages or 50k pages or 1 million pages, even more. AI has dramatically shifted the search landscape through a click through rate and conversion perspective.  The Majority of big companies have made AI search one of its highest priorities so, you should be worried about technical optimization.

My worst nightmare is having a large e-commerce website with boat loads of JS and a customs CMS and the management said they we want to focus on AI search and show up in AI overview, ChatGPT, etc…

I am sure you can relate.

Let’s go through a list of what is, in my view, the top technical SEO items in this AI age and what will be significant in the months/years to come. This is not going to be in any particular order. Think of this as like an AJ Kohn article. 

Here are the most important technical SEO items for medium to large websites for 2026:

• Log File Analysis is an important way to map your website in the lens of an LLM or Googlebot. I like to do two things with a log files. 1) compare it to Screaming Frog’s file hierarchy when you finish a site crawl. This tells you the important pages of the site with a good visual. The goal of this to see what pages LLMs are hitting, how much time it is taking to crawl hub pages, product pages, category pages (if an e-commerce site.) 2.) Compare the speed to page speed insights reports to see page load speed for different pages and any blockers. Page speed plays a bigger role now more than ever in AI search.
• Page Speed components to optimize has a real time positive impact on AI search. AI platforms tend to fetch pages in real time so slow pages provide difficulties for rendering.  It is important to attack page speed from all angles, be it JavaScript to making sure you have a CDN. If the requests and fetching take too long, the client abandon’s the request and goes to the next request.
• Internal linking is the heart of any medium to large website because it provides accessibility to the user, LLM crawlers and search engine crawlers. Internal linking is something that is still very much overlooked in small and large websites, particularly e-commerce websites.  Internal linking breaks down content silos and ties pages together to make a better user experience.
• Author Profiles, while I know this is a technical piece, I have to mention this tactic because it seems to be under-utilized. This will especially help smaller websites to build credibility. To enhance the credibility of blog posts it is important to keep in mind internal and external linking, however when thinking of EEAT, you think of content that is trustworthy. That is why it is important to create an author profile that is linked to the blog so there is credibility to the piece.
• Schema Markup is one of the most important tactics you can implement to enhance the most important parts of your content in your meta data. Schema is pieces of JavaScript code that highlight the content that can be extracted into the SERP. Google has gone back and forth about using certain types of schema, the most recent being the sunsetting of FAQ schema markup. I still think there is value in having markups in place for a couple reasons: 1. it still works for other search engines. 2. AI still likes direct question and answer style content, and it is a convenient tool for users to satisfy their questions at the end of the day.
• User-generated content is still the thing AI trust the most because it is organic. The top sources for ChatGPT and AI Overviews are still Reddit and Wikipedia so this is interesting for big brands. If you are an e-commerce brand it is smart to have reviews on your products where people can comment and formulate opinions. While you aren’t going to overtake Reddit, it is smart to have some sort of natural community-based discussion about your product or service.

At the end of the day, it is 30x harder to appear in AI results than traditional local search:

• 1.2% of local businesses are recommended by ChatGPT compared to 35.9% that appear in Google’s local results.

These are some essential tactics that will help you get the ball rolling for your SEO/GEO strategy. Hope this helps to get the ball rolling at a high level to develop a roadmap for your business. Contact West Loop SEO to discuss a customized strategy and get you showing up!