Traditional SEO is about ranking on Google — getting your blue link to appear when someone searches your name or skill set. But in 2025, the way people discover information is shifting. Instead of scrolling through search results, people are typing questions directly into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini and getting a direct answer. No links, no scrolling — just a response. This is called GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and for personal brands like developer portfolios, it's becoming just as important as traditional SEO. If an AI model doesn't know you exist, you're invisible to an entire generation of users who never visit a search results page.
The fundamental difference between traditional SEO and AI SEO is how the content is consumed. Google reads your meta tags, canonical URLs, and structured data. AI models read everything — your body text, your about section, your project descriptions — and synthesise it into a coherent understanding of who you are. This means keyword stuffing and backlink farming don't work here. What works is clear, factual, first-person content that directly answers "who is this person, what do they do, where are they based, and what are they good at." Your portfolio should answer all of these questions in plain readable text, not buried in JSON-LD that only bots can see. The more clearly and consistently you state your identity across your pages, the more confidently an AI model will reference you when someone asks a relevant question.
On the technical side, there are a few concrete things you can do right now to improve your AI crawlability. First, update your robots.txt to explicitly allow major AI crawlers — GPTBot for OpenAI, ClaudeBot for Anthropic, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, Google-Extended for Gemini, and CCBot for Common Crawl which feeds most open-source LLMs. By default these bots can access your site, but naming them explicitly sends a clear signal of intent. Second, create a llms.txt file at the root of your domain — a new emerging standard specifically designed for AI models. Think of it as a plain-text resume for LLMs: your name, role, location, stack, projects, certifications, and contact info — all in a structured, easy-to-parse format. It takes 15 minutes to write and puts your portfolio ahead of 99% of developer sites out there. Third, make sure your JSON-LD Person schema is complete with your name, job title, location, social profiles, and website URL — this is the most machine-readable signal you can give any AI crawler about your identity.
Finally, don't underestimate the power of being mentioned on high-authority sites. AI models are trained on data scraped from across the web — GitHub, LinkedIn, Dev.to, Hashnode, and other developer platforms all feed into training datasets. Writing articles like this one, contributing to open source, and keeping your LinkedIn active all increase the chance that an AI model encounters your name in its training data and builds a confident, accurate understanding of who you are. Traditional SEO and AI SEO aren't separate strategies — they reinforce each other. Build for humans first, structure for machines second, and the AI visibility will follow.
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