Conventional SEO remains the foundation: crawlers need complete HTML, the correct canonical URL, useful internal links, and a comprehensible page structure. AEO helps search and answer systems extract a short, self-contained response. GEO asks a different question: whether a brand appears in generative answers, is described accurately, and which sources are cited.

I start with technical accessibility and an intent map, reviewing routes, SSR or prerendering, sitemap, robots, hreflang, structured data, and duplicates. Then I assess whether content provides direct answers, primary facts, authorship, dates, limitations, and meaningful links. Generic advice gains no information value from FAQPage or llms.txt.

GEO needs a reproducible query set, not three favourable screenshots. The system, region, and wording are recorded; brand mentions, citations, factual accuracy, and competitor answers are measured separately. A guaranteed position is not a valid promise because models, personalisation, and undisclosed ranking methods change.

Scope follows the problem. A technical audit is not the editing of hundreds of articles, and schema implementation is not continuous monitoring. Engineering acceptance means indexable URLs, valid markup, and accessible text; content acceptance means agreed intents without cannibalisation; GEO acceptance means a repeatable report on one query set.