Guide
Answers to questions about SEO, GEO and AI visibility. Every page answers in its first paragraph — no preamble.
Can ChatGPT see my website, and how do I check?
There are two ways to check, and they answer different questions. Asking ChatGPT tells you what it remembers or can find right now. Looking at `robots.txt` and your server responses tells you whether it has any way to read you at all — and without that, the first answer will always be "I don't know".
What does "not enough data" mean in the Core Web Vitals report?
It means your site has too few real Chrome visitors. The Core Web Vitals assessment is based on CrUX — measurements from real people, not a lab test. Until there is enough traffic there will be no assessment, and no amount of page speed work changes that.
What do I do about "Discovered – currently not indexed"?
It means Google knows your URL but has not once come to read it. This is not an error or a penalty but a decision about importance: the site has many URLs and this one does not look worth the queue. Internal links and fewer junk URLs are what help.
Why are two of my pages competing with each other?
Cannibalization is when several of your pages answer the same question. Google cannot show both, so it picks one — often not the one you would choose — and the position starts swinging between them. The fix is almost always merging, not optimising.
Should I block AI crawlers?
The answer depends on one thing: whether your revenue comes from the visit. For a publisher whose business is advertising on the page, blocking can be the right call. For a service or product company it means disappearing from the answers that could have recommended it.
How do I write a title and description Google will actually show?
Google rewrites a title when it does not match what is actually on the page, when it repeats across other pages of the same domain, or when it runs too long. What survives untouched is a short, specific, unique title containing what the person searched for.
How do I set up two languages and hreflang correctly?
Each language needs its own stable URL, and both versions must point at each other. Google only accepts an `hreflang` group when it is reciprocal: if A points to B but B does not point back, the whole declaration is ignored and the two languages start competing with each other.
What is AEO, and how do I get into the direct answer?
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is shaping a page so a direct answer can be lifted from it — a Google featured snippet or a paragraph inside an AI answer. What decides it is not length but structure: the question as a heading and the answer immediately below.
What is llms.txt, and do I actually need it?
llms.txt is a plain text file at the root of a site that tells AI systems what the site is and which pages to read first. It is not a standard and no vendor has publicly committed to reading it — useful, but not the first job on the list.
Why doesn't Google index my pages?
The usual reason is neither a penalty nor an algorithm secret. The page is either technically unreachable for Googlebot, or it asks not to be indexed (`noindex`, a `canonical` pointing elsewhere), or Google found it, read it and decided it adds nothing new to what the index already holds.
Why is my website slow, and where do I start?
Almost always three things, and almost always in this order: oversized images, render-blocking CSS and JavaScript, and a slow server response. Everything else is detail that only becomes visible once those three are handled.
What is GEO optimization, and how is it different from SEO?
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is preparing a website so that AI assistants — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude — understand it, cite it and recommend it. It differs from SEO in its goal: SEO wants the click on your link, GEO wants your answer inside the text the person reads without clicking anything.