LEAF Advisory · AEO / GEO / AI SEO
Make your website easier to find, understand and reference.
Search visibility now spans traditional results, generated answers and AI-powered discovery. LEAF works with your web, marketing and content teams on the foundations they share: technical access, clear content, structured entities and a coherent semantic architecture.
We improve the signals your website exposes. Search engines and AI platforms still decide what they index, rank, retrieve or cite.
What AEO / GEO / AI SEO is
Make the website easier for machines to read, without making it worse for people.
Traditional search engines still send people to websites. Alongside them, generative search experiences and AI assistants retrieve pages, summarize them and reference some of them as sources.
AEO / GEO / AI SEO is the Advisory work of improving how a website can be crawled, interpreted, retrieved and referenced by these systems, while keeping it useful for the people who read it.
It is not a ranking guarantee, a link-building package or a content farm.
Terminology
SEO, AEO and GEO overlap more than they differ.
The three terms describe different surfaces. The work underneath is largely the same.
- SEOSearch Engine Optimization
- Improve the technical accessibility, structure and quality of a website so search engines can crawl, index and evaluate its pages for organic search.
- AEOAnswer Engine Optimization
- Structure clear, self-contained answers to real questions so search features and assistants can retrieve and interpret them.
- GEOGenerative Engine Optimization
- Improve the accessibility, clarity and source signals of content used by generative search and AI systems that retrieve and synthesize web information. GEO is a commonly used term, not a standardized discipline, and here it never means geographic targeting.
Shared foundations
- crawlability
- renderable HTML
- canonicalization
- content clarity
- information architecture
- entities
- structured data
- internal links
- source attribution
- freshness
One engagement, not three separate packages.
The optimization model
Access. Understand. Trust. Retrieve. Measure.
Five questions, asked in order. Each stage depends on the one before it.
Access
Can search and AI crawlers reach and render the intended content?
- status codes
- robots.txt
- crawler policies
- rendering
- canonical URLs
- hreflang
- indexability
- internal links
- performance
Being crawlable does not guarantee being indexed, but content that cannot be reached cannot be used.
Understand
Can systems identify what the page is about?
- HTML hierarchy
- page purpose
- headings
- definitions
- topic consistency
- internal linking
Machines should not have to infer the site's architecture from disconnected pages.
Trust
Are authorship, organization, entities, sources and claims represented clearly?
- organization identity
- authors
- dates
- source attribution
- consistent claims
- entity identifiers
Clear identity and sources make content easier to evaluate. They do not guarantee a citation.
Retrieve
Can a useful answer or passage be extracted without reconstructing meaning from fragmented content?
- direct answers
- definitions
- self-contained passages
- descriptive headings
- tables
- citations
Passage extraction does not work identically across platforms, so the structure must be sound for people first.
Measure
Can teams observe whether the underlying signals and discovery patterns improve?
- technical checks
- search data
- AI answer samples
Improvements are followed over time with verifiable indicators, not a single score.
Technical foundations
Establish what systems actually see before changing anything.
Crawlability, indexability, robots directives, canonical URLs, rendering and performance come first. The content you want found has to be reachable and readable without depending on client-side scripts.
- server-rendered critical content
- crawlable links
- stable URLs
- Core Web Vitals
- no hidden client-only copy
Server-side rendering is not mandatory for every architecture. The requirement is that important content is reliably accessible to crawlers.
Audit first
- Crawl
- Render
- Inspect
- Map
Recommendations start from what search and AI systems can really access, not from assumptions.
Prioritized, not a flat checklist
- impact
- scope
- confidence
- effort
- dependency
Findings are ordered with your team on these dimensions, not by a universal scoring formula.
Content & answer structure
Write for people. Structure for retrieval.
A page should make important questions and answers understandable in isolation as well as in context.
A common answer pattern
- A clear question as heading
- A direct introductory answer
- Supporting explanation
- Source or evidence
- Related context
Not every paragraph should become an FAQ. We avoid
- keyword-stuffed paragraphs
- repetitive FAQ blocks
- unnatural headings
- hundreds of thin pages
- machine-only text
Trust and source signals
- clear organization identity
- author information where relevant
- publication and update dates where meaningful
- source attribution
- consistent factual claims
- canonical entity identifiers
- transparent product and service relationships
These signals make content easier to evaluate. None of them guarantees an AI citation.
Subject-matter expertise stays with your team. LEAF designs content architecture, defines answer patterns, reviews and restructures pages and provides editorial guidance; it does not manufacture authority your organization does not have.
Structured data & entities
Structured data describes what is on the page. It does not create facts.
Schema.org helps machines interpret visible information and the relationships between the organization, its people, services and products. It does not create facts that are absent from the page.
Structured data must match visible content.
sameAs is used for genuine external identity references, not as a list of every page that mentions the entity.
Organization
- People
- Services
- Products
- Locations
- Articles
- Related entities
Every entity needs
- a stable identity
- a canonical URL
- consistent naming
- valid relationships
Semantic architecture
Make the boundaries of expertise clear.
Topic hierarchy, pillar pages, supporting pages, internal links and entity relationships should show what the organization knows and how its offer is organized.
- Topic hierarchy
- Pillar pages
- Supporting pages
- Internal links
- Entity relationships
We avoid mass-producing pages just to create topical coverage.
A good page makes useful information easy to extract
- direct answers
- clear definitions
- self-contained passages
- descriptive headings
- useful tables
- citations
- consistent terminology
Passage extraction varies between platforms; the same structure also serves human readers.
Crawler policy
Not every AI crawler does the same thing.
Search, retrieval and training crawlers behave differently and can be managed separately in robots.txt and crawler policies.
Search crawlers
Index pages for search results and search features.
Retrieval crawlers
Fetch pages when an AI system answers a user's request in real time.
Training crawlers
Collect content that may be used to train models.
Whether to allow a crawler depends on what it does and on your publishing and data-use objectives. LEAF helps define the policy; we do not recommend allowing or blocking every AI crawler by default.
Where relevant we also audit robots.txt, sitemap.xml, structured data, feeds and machine-readable files such as llms.txt, llms-full.txt or ai-training-data.json. None of these is a ranking requirement.
llms.txt can provide an additional machine-readable representation of important content, but it complements crawlable pages, structured HTML, sitemaps and structured data rather than replacing them, and platform support is not universal.
How we work
Scout. Connect. Unlock.
LEAF Advisory helps determine what should change, why it matters and what should be prioritized. This is not merely an automated audit.
01/ Scout
Audit what machines can access and understand
Review how the website is crawled, rendered and described: what search engines and AI crawlers can reach, how content is structured and where the barriers are.
02/ Connect
Connect findings to your priorities
Link the findings to the pages, questions and entities that matter for the business, and turn them into a prioritized plan instead of a generic checklist.
03/ Unlock
Implement and embed
Put the changes into practice with your web and content teams and integrate the work into ongoing publishing, so progress can be followed over time.
Measurement
Three kinds of evidence, never one score.
Progress is observed on three separate layers, each with its own data and its own limits.
Technical
- crawl and index coverage
- status and canonical issues
- structured data validity
- rendering
Verifiable directly on the website.
Search
- impressions
- queries
- pages
- clicks
- organic visibility
Where first-party or platform data is available.
AI discovery
- periodic observation of how selected systems retrieve, describe or reference the organization
Sampled, repeated over time.
AI systems personalize, change models and retrieval, and vary answers by time, location and account. AI-answer observations are samples, not deterministic ranking measurements.
There is no universal "AI rank" or "ChatGPT position": we use observable tests and trends instead.
Advisory, Huntair SEO and Academy
A consulting capability, supported by a Labs product.
Advisory service
AEO / GEO / AI SEO
The consulting capability: evaluate the website, prioritize the work with your team and connect it to business goals.
Explore LEAF AdvisoryLabs SaaS product
Huntair SEO
A separate LEAF Labs product. It can support the engagement by continuously auditing technical SEO, content, semantic structure and AI-readiness signals and making findings easier to recheck over time. It does not replace business context, editorial judgement, subject-matter expertise or prioritization with you.
Explore Huntair SEOAcademy
LEAF Academy
Long-term results depend on the people who publish and maintain the site. Academy can help content, marketing and web teams with clear content, structured answers, semantic publishing and AI and search literacy.
Explore LEAF Academy- Advisory: decide what matters
- Implementation with your teams
- Huntair SEO: audit and recheck
- Feedback to Advisory and your team
Huntair SEO supports the engagement; it is not the engagement.
Clear scope
What we improve, and what platforms decide.
What we improve with you
- technical accessibility
- content clarity
- answer structure
- source attribution
- structured data
- entity consistency
- topic architecture
- internal linking
- monitoring process
What platforms decide
- indexing
- ranking
- retrieval
- citation
- generated-answer composition
- rich-result presentation
- crawler behavior
For this reason we do not promise rankings, traffic, citations or inclusion in AI answers. Google Search, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Claude are examples of evolving discovery systems, not platforms LEAF controls or partners with.
When this work fits
Useful when the website is part of how customers and machines understand the organization.
- Important pages are difficult to crawl
- The site architecture has grown inconsistently
- Structured data is fragmented
- Business entities are ambiguous
- Content does not answer target questions clearly
- AI discovery matters strategically
Better optimization cannot compensate for missing expertise, weak products, inaccurate claims or content that does not answer anything useful.
Limits
Better signals, not guaranteed outcomes.
We commit to the quality of the foundations and to indicators you can verify.
- Platforms decide indexing, ranking, retrieval and citation.
- Crawlability does not guarantee indexing.
- Structured data does not guarantee rich results or AI citations.
- AI answers vary; observations are samples, not rankings.
- Platform behavior and crawler policies change over time.
- Results depend on the expertise and accuracy of the content itself.
See what machines see
How does your website look from the crawler side?
Show us the website, the audiences you need to reach and the questions you want the organization to be found for. We can audit what search and AI systems can access and interpret, then prioritize the changes that matter.