AEO
Before You Chase AI Search, Get the Technical Foundations Right
AI search is constantly changing, and this post is an update to the ones we wrote in February. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews keep changing how they choose their sources, and the advice changes with them. What we have learned since February is simple: none of it lands unless the technical foundations of your website are right first.
Why the advice keeps changing
The AI tools are new products in a fast-moving market. Models get retrained, crawlers get renamed, answer formats get redesigned, and what worked one month can quietly stop working the next. If you have read three articles on how to show up in ChatGPT and each said something different, this is why. None of them were necessarily wrong. They were describing a moving target.
The foundations come first
Every AI system, whichever company builds it, has to do the same three things before it can mention you: reach your site, understand what it says, and decide you are a credible source. All three depend on technical foundations, not on clever content.
- Reach. Your site has to let AI crawlers in, list its pages for them, and give them a short summary of who you are.
- Understand. Your pages need to be readable without running scripts, with one clear heading per page, honest titles and descriptions, and structured data that names your business, location and services in a format machines can parse.
- Trust. Your business details need to match across your website, your Google Business Profile and the directories your industry uses, so an AI finds the same story everywhere it looks.
To be honest, this list is not fixed either. The llms.txt file on it did not exist two years ago, and new requirements are appearing all the time. So the job is not to set the foundations once and forget them. It is to get them right now, and keep them current as the list grows.
Most of this is invisible from the front of a website. A site can look beautiful and still fail half of it. Most of the sites we audit do.
What “done” looks like: our own site
Rather than describe it, here is the audit result for minodesignanddigital.com.au, run on 18 September 2026 with the same free tool we offer on this site.
Technical setup
Findability
Structured data
Content structure
The same checks as the free audit on this site. Scores from Google PageSpeed Insights on the day.
The performance score is 94, not 100, and we are fine with that. The point is not perfection. It is that every foundation an AI system needs today is in place, so anything we publish starts from a site that can actually be cited. We re-run this check on our own site regularly, because the list of what counts keeps growing.
What this means for you
Before you spend on AI content, new pages or anything sold as “AEO”, get the foundations checked. If your site fails the technical checks, new content sits on a base AI systems cannot read, and you will never know why it is not working. If it passes, you can put your effort into content and reputation knowing it will land.
The foundations are also what make you the obvious choice in your field, for a simple reason: when an AI is asked for a recommendation, it picks from the businesses it can see clearly. That is a smaller group than you would think.
Get your site checked
Run the free Brisbane SEO and AI search audit. It takes under a minute and runs the same ten checks you see above, with a plain-English fix for anything that fails. If you would rather talk it through, book a free discovery call or see our SEO and AEO service.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Do I need to redo the technical foundations every time AI search changes?
- Not redo, but re-check. The core items, such as crawler access, a sitemap, an llms.txt summary, readable HTML, clear headings, accurate titles and structured data, stay in place once done. New requirements do appear, though, so a check every few months, and whenever the site changes, keeps you current without starting over.
- Can a website look fine and still fail these checks?
- Yes, and it is the most common result we see. Blocked AI crawlers, missing structured data and content that only appears after scripts run are all invisible from the front of the site. The audit shows them in under a minute.
- Is this different from normal SEO?
- They overlap heavily. Google has wanted the same clean foundations for years. The AI-specific additions are a small set of things like allowing AI crawlers, publishing an llms.txt file and making sure your business is described as an entity in structured data.
- If my site passes every check, will AI tools recommend me?
- Passing makes you eligible. Being chosen still depends on clear, specific content and on your reputation across reviews, directories and mentions. The foundations are the entry ticket, not the whole game.
