An AI cannot cite a page it cannot read. Before any GEO tactic, the boring technical basics decide whether you are even eligible.
Every AI-visibility strategy has a precondition that nobody likes to talk about. If a search engine cannot crawl and index your page, the AI built on top of it cannot use your page. Google states the rule directly: to appear in its generative features, a page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet." Technical SEO is the entry fee.
Start with the unglamorous checklist. Your important pages should be crawlable, returning clean status codes, free of accidental noindex tags, and present in your sitemap. Verify it in Search Console rather than assuming. A page blocked by a stray robots rule is invisible to both search and AI, and the failure is silent.
Google says you do not need perfect, valid HTML, the web rarely has it, but semantic structure still helps. Headings, lists, and landmarks let screen readers, crawlers, and increasingly browser agents parse your page. If you use a JavaScript framework, follow JS SEO basics so your content is not hidden behind code the crawler cannot execute. This matters more than it used to: client-rendered pages that show nothing until JavaScript runs are a real visibility risk.
Getting cited is half the job. The person who follows the link arrives at your site, and page experience decides what happens next. Fast loads, a layout that works on a phone, and a clear separation between your content and the clutter around it all help. Google folds this under "good page experience," and it applies whether the visitor came from a blue link or an AI answer.
The technical anxiety around AI search is mostly misplaced. You do not need to chunk content into fragments, write a separate machine-readable file for every page, or add special schema just for AI. Google says so directly. Structured data is still worth adding for rich results, and an llms.txt file is a cheap experiment, but neither is the lever people claim.
Spend the saved energy on the basics that compound: a site that loads fast, renders its content without a fight, and can be crawled cleanly. Do that, and every other AI-visibility move you make has something solid to stand on. Skip it, and the best content in your category still will not show up, because nothing could read it in the first place.
