SEO, AEO, and GEO strategies in 2027: Do seven things before the end of the year to make your website findable by both Google and ChatGPT
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SEO, AEO, and GEO strategies in 2027: Do seven things before the end of the year to make your website findable by both Google and ChatGPT

#SEO

A magnifying glass illuminates the document building on the island on the sea, and the documents turn into pages and float towards the star map sphere that symbolizes AI

For every 100 clicks, Google now leaves 58.

Here’s what Ahrefs found when they reran the study in February 2026: When AI snippets appeared in search results, the click-through rate for the top-ranked page was 58% lower than it was at the end of 2023. The same study a year ago measured 34.5%. Within a year, it expanded from more than 30% to nearly 60%.

If you have watched your website traffic drop this year and received several sales letters about “GEO generative engine optimization, let ChatGPT recommend your brand”, this article is for you.

Let’s talk about the position first: GEO is mostly SEO, the difference is hidden in a few technical details

Google’s official guidelines released in 2026 “Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search (opens in a new tab)” are very straightforward:

From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.

Translated into vernacular, that is to say: from Google’s perspective, optimizing for AI search is still SEO. The same guide also says that you don’t need to create separate AI-specific text files, markup, or Markdown.

I agree with this position, but would like to add: Google just Google. ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity have their own crawlers, some do not execute JavaScript, and some rely heavily on Bing’s index. Google’s guidelines won’t tell you these details, but they determine whether AI can read your website.

Therefore, the structure of this guide is simple: follow the basic SEO skills, plus a few AI-specific checks. Among the seven things, the first four can be done in an afternoon without the help of an engineer; the last three are long-term tasks, and you just need to establish a habit before the end of the year.

What to do before 2024What to do in 2027
Structured dataAdd FAQ schema, and a drop-down Q&A will appear in the search resultsThe FAQ drop-down Q&A has stopped displaying, and the author page and organizational information have been updated
Search enginesJust GoogleGoogle plus Bing because Copilot indexes with Bing
Content”X Tips” list article with keywordsArticles with original data, first-hand experience, and named authors
Off-siteBuy backlinksLet the brand name appear on other people’s websites, videos, and forums
IndicatorsKeyword rankingNumber of AI exposures, frequency of mentions, number of inquiries from AI visitors

Before you start: Prepare these four permissions

  1. Modify the permissions of the website’s robots.txt (if you use WordPress, most SEO plug-ins can change it; if you use a website store, please ask the other party for assistance).
  2. Ownership of Google Search Console.
  3. Editor rights for Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
  4. If the website uses Cloudflare, prepare a backend account.

First things first: Make sure you’re not blocking out the AI (30 minutes)

The AI company’s crawlers are divided into three uses: using web pages to train models, building search indexes for reference, and users currently asking AI to read a certain web page. If you block the wrong one, the results will be vastly different.

OpenAI’s official document (opens in a new tab) states that websites that block OAI-SearchBot “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”, that is, they will not appear in ChatGPT’s search answers; blocking GPTBot will only affect model training. Anthropic and Perplexity have the same division of labor.

If you want to be cited by AI search but don’t want to provide training materials for free, robots.txt can be written like this:

# Search/citation bots: allow
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

# Training bots: your call; this example blocks them
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Whether or not to block the training class is actually a question of stance. It makes sense to block publishers who make money from their content; it also makes sense to let all service industries that want customers to come to their doorstep let them go.

Then do two checks, taking five minutes each.

Search Console’s AI settings. Google will open a new setting to the world on August 31, 2026: “Settings > Search generative AI”. If you select “Exclude”, the website will not appear in the AI ​​summary and AI mode, and the general ranking will not be affected. The default is to include, just go in and make sure that no one has mistakenly set it to exclude. By the way, blocking Google-Extended will not make you disappear from the AI ​​summary, it is just for the training purpose of Gemini; if you really want to exit, use this setting.

Cloudflare’s AI bot policy. Cloudflare will change to blocking AI crawlers by default starting in July 2025, and will adjust the default for new domains on September 15, 2026. Go to “Configure AI bot policies” in the background and confirm that the Search category is Allow. If the Agent class is blocked and users paste your URL to ChatGPT, ChatGPT will not be able to read it.

The second thing: add Bing to give Copilot and ChatGPT one more way to find you (1 hour)

Many Taiwanese websites have never registered Bing Webmaster Tools. This will be a hole in 2027 and worth noting.

Let’s look at the strength of the evidence first. Strong evidence, such as: Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries are indexed by Bing, and Bing launched the “AI Performance” report in February 2026. You can see how many times your website has been cited by AI and what query AI used to find you. Weaker evidence is for ChatGPT: a 2025 study by Seer Interactive found that 87% of ChatGPT search citations fell within the Bing top 20, but another redo study of 400 queries in 2026 only got 27%. Saying “ChatGPT only looks at Bing” is too exaggerated, but saying “doing Bing well will help” is justifiable.

Coupled with a local figure: StatCounter data in September 2026, Bing accounted for 8.24% of the search market in Taiwan, which was nearly 10%.

  1. Register with Bing Webmaster Tools, you can directly import the verification of Google Search Console and send the sitemap.
  2. Start IndexNow. This is an open protocol. When you publish or update an article, you actively notify search engines to crawl it. Bing participates, but Google does not. Most WordPress SEO plug-ins and Cloudflare have built-in switches, so there is no need to write programs.
  3. Look at the Grounding queries in the AI ​​Performance report once a month. This is the only officially provided data on “what words does AI use to find you”.

Third thing: Check if the AI can read your page (15 minutes)

After analyzing the requests of the AI crawler, Vercel found that GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot did not execute JavaScript. Just because Google can read your web page, it doesn’t mean that ChatGPT can.

Anyone can do the test: open your article in Chrome, right-click and select “View Web Page Source” (not “Inspect”), and press Ctrl+F to search for a sentence in the middle of the article. If it can be found, it will be fine; if it cannot be found, it means that the content is loaded by JavaScript, and most AI crawlers cannot see it.

There are three common landmines: an official website made into a single-page application using a front-end framework, an e-commerce page with price specifications dynamically loaded using JavaScript, and key points hidden in tabs opened by bullet points. The inspection only takes 15 minutes, and the correction has to be handed over to the engineers to change to server-side rendering or static generation.

The fourth thing: Stop doing FAQ on structured data and update the author page (2 hours)

If you are still teaching people to “add FAQ schema so that drop-down questions and answers appear in the search results”, this effect no longer exists. Google will limit FAQ drop-down questions and answers to government and medical websites starting in 2023. It will stop displaying completely in May 2026, and even official documents will be removed in June. There is no need to rush to delete those that have been added. Google says that structured data that is not in use will not cause problems.

Google’s guidelines also say that AI search does not require any special schema. Do we still need to do structured data? Yes, but put your efforts in two places:

  • Homepage plus Organization (LocalBusiness for physical stores): brand name, logo, website, social links, and Google business profile. Official Guidelines Naming business profiles helps appear in AI responses.
  • Author Page plus ProfilePage: Google Docs clearly states that this tag applies to the blog’s “About Me” page and the company’s employee introduction page. The author column of the article can be linked to this page.

The markup for your author page looks like this, and is placed on your “About Me” page:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "ProfilePage",
  "mainEntity": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Jane Doe",
    "jobTitle": "Content Marketing Consultant",
    "url": "https://www.example.com/about",
    "sameAs": [
      "https://www.linkedin.com/in/example",
      "https://www.facebook.com/example"
    ]
  }
}
</script>

After finishing, use Google’s Rich Results Test to verify the format.

The fifth thing: Pick an old article and change it to a version that AI will quote (2 to 3 hours per article)

There is a comparison that I really like in Google’s 2026 guidelines. It calls articles such as “7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers” commodity content. Commodity-style content relies on common sense that everyone knows. The opposite example is “Why We Waived the Inspection & Saved Money” (Why we gave up the home inspection and saved money), which has personal experience and specific details. The guide also says: “Don’t just recycle what others on the internet have already said.” Don’t just recycle what others on the internet have said.

Academic research points in the same direction. A GEO paper (KDD 2024) from Princeton University and other schools in the United States tested nine rewriting methods and found that adding statistics and citations has the most significant improvement in AI citations, which can increase visibility by up to 40%; traditional keyword stuffing often performs worse. This is the result of an experimental environment and is not equivalent to the actual behavior of ChatGPT today, but the direction is consistent with what Google says.

For practical operation, start with the top three articles on your website:

  1. The first paragraph under the title of each paragraph directly answers the question to be discussed in this paragraph, and then expands on the details.
  2. Rewrite “X skills” into “What we actually did and what the results were” and add numbers, dates, and photos.
  3. Add a real person signature, and the signature is connected to the author page of the fourth thing. Google’s useful content document lists “Is there a signature and can the signature be linked to the author’s introduction?” as a self-check question.

The sixth thing: let others speak for you (4 hours a month, keep doing it)

Ahrefs analyzed the visibility of 75,000 brands in ChatGPT and Google AI functions in December 2025. The single most relevant factor is brand mentions on YouTube (correlation coefficient is about 0.737), followed by brand mentions on the Internet; the traditional domain authority score is only about 0.3, and the amount of website content has almost no relationship. The author himself reminds that correlation does not equal causation.

Another study by Profound, which analyzed about 680 million AI citations, showed that Reddit and YouTube were the top two sources of citations in Google AI Summary and Perplexity. Switching to the Taiwanese scenario, the corresponding ones are probably Dcard, PTT, and Mobile01. However, this is an analogy. There is currently no quantitative research on Taiwanese forums being cited by AI.

SEO expert Lily Ray put it very well in a May 2026 interview: “That’s getting recommended by everybody else without recommending yourself.” Let others recommend you, rather than recommending yourself.

Well, this sentence deserves special attention from Taiwanese industry players. There are now GEO services on the market that boast of “producing hundreds of pages of content in 30 to 45 days” (the industry’s self-reported results), and Lily Ray observed that almost all websites repaired by Google in January 2026 had hundreds or even thousands of self-recommended list articles. Google’s guidelines also state outright that deliberately creating inauthentic mentions is not as useful as it seems. AI relies heavily on search results to obtain new information. It is first demoted by Google and then disappears from AI answers.

Here’s what SMEs can do:

  1. Record a 3- to 5-minute YouTube explanation of each of the three most frequently asked questions by customers. There is no need to operate a channel, just have one first.
  2. List three industry media or podcasts that may report on you, and make proactive proposals. The goal is for the brand name to appear on other people’s websites, and whether there are links attached is secondary.
  3. Organize your Google business profile and invite real customers to leave reviews.
  4. Answer questions in the forum with your real identity and do not buy professional posts.

The seventh thing: start measuring, and stop asking “Where am I ranked in ChatGPT” (1 hour to build, 2 hours per month)

Fix one thing first. In the article “Customers no longer use Google, they ask AI before placing orders” I suggested that you open three AIs to measure the visibility. This suggestion needs to be updated.

SparkToro found about 600 volunteers in January 2026 and placed the same brand recommendation prompt words on ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI 2,961 times. As a result, the chance of the same brand list appearing twice is less than one percent. AI recommendations are different every time. The results of a single test have almost no reference value, and the “ranking” is meaningless.

The more reliable ones are three free dashboards, plus a manual test:

Generative AI performance reporting for Search Console. It will be visible on all global websites from August 31, 2026. You can see the number of exposures and which pages you have used in AI summaries and AI modes. You can’t see the clicks, but at least you know if the AI ​​is using your content.

GA4’s AI guest pipeline. The default pipeline of GA4 already has “AI Assistant”, but the officially listed sources do not include Perplexity and Claude, nor do they include Google’s own AI summary and AI mode. It is recommended to create a pipeline group by yourself: Management > Data Display > Pipeline Group > Create a new pipeline group, add a new pipeline called “AI Visitor”, select the source of the work stage as the condition, match the rule expression, and paste:

.*(chatgpt\.com|chat\.openai\.com|perplexity\.ai|claude\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com|deepseek\.com|grok\.com|meta\.ai).*

The most important step: drag this pipe above the Referral. GA4 will assign the traffic to the first qualified channel, and if it is placed below, it will never receive traffic. (The Chinese interface name is subject to your actual screen.)

Bing’s AI Performance report. The second thing is already set.

Monthly Mention Rate Test. List 10 questions that customers will really ask, such as “Recommended accounting firms in Taichung suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises”. There is a fixed day every month, and each question is asked 5 times in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI modes, and a new conversation is opened each time. Use a spreadsheet to note whether you were mentioned and which competing products were mentioned, and calculate your mention rate: the number of mentions divided by the total number of questions. Look at the three-month trend, not the single result.

FAQ

llms.txt Do you want to do it?

No need to rush. Google’s John Mueller said in June 2025: “FWIW no AI system currently uses llms.txt.” Google’s 2026 guidelines also say that there is no need to create AI-specific text files.

AI brings so little traffic, is it worth spending time?

Look at your business model. According to data from Similarweb in September 2026, global AI referral traffic has grown by 117% in a year, but still only accounts for a low single-digit percentage of total traffic for most websites. Ahrefs’ own AI traffic only accounts for 0.5%, but contributes to 12.1% of registrations; however, another study of theirs also found that the bounce rate of AI visitors is higher than that of search visitors. Taken together, AI attracts fewer and more accurate users, and is suitable for B2B and high unit price services; if you rely on page views to earn advertising fees, AI traffic cannot make up for the lost clicks.

After being cited by AI abstract, will the traffic come back?

Can’t go back to the past. Seer Interactive tracked data for 53 brands: Brands cited in AI snippets had 120% higher click-through rates than those without, but still 38% lower than queries without AI snippets. GEO’s goal is to stay under the new ceiling without falling to the bottom.

Do you want to buy an AI ranking tracking tool or GEO service?

Let’s finish the seven things in this article first. AI recommendations are inherently random, and ranking tracking is likely to measure noise. Google’s guidelines also remind that no third-party tools can access Google’s internal ranking or AI systems, and be careful if they claim to guarantee results.

Three things to watch for in 2027

The following three things have official announcements, and their impact on next year is my inference.

AI mode will become the main battlefield. Google announced at I/O in May 2026 that the number of monthly active users of the AI ​​model exceeded 1 billion, and that it would integrate AI summaries and AI models. The Traditional Chinese version of the AI ​​mode will be online in October 2025. Next year’s “ranking” will be more difficult to define, and the focus of measurement will shift from ranking to exposure, mention rate and number of inquiries.

AI agent starts buying things for the user. Google announced the Universal Commerce Protocol in January 2026, which allows users to check out directly from retailers in AI mode. It is currently limited to a few markets such as the United States. It is unlikely that Taiwan will fully open up next year, but whether the website is friendly to AI agents (the structure is clear, prices and inventory are written in the source code) will change from a bonus to a basic feature. If you are an e-commerce merchant, please complete the product information in Merchant Center now.

Whether to quit Google AI will become a real business decision. Search Console already has opt-out settings and dedicated reports. Content sites that rely on advertising views may have to do some serious accounting next year; the service industry and B2B should stay in it and use reports to monitor exposure.

Things you can do this week

If you only have an afternoon, do the first three things: check robots.txt and Search Console settings, sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools, and test your homepage by viewing source code. After completing these three things, you will at least be sure that AI can find you and read you.

The rest is scheduled on the calendar before the end of the year: update the author page in October, rewrite an old article and record the first YouTube commentary in November, build the GA4 pipeline in December, and do the first mention rate test. By January 2027, you have three months of data on where to add your next move.

Extended reading

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Vista Cheng speaks and runs workshops on AI workflows, writing and content systems for companies, schools and public agencies.

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