SEO, AEO, GEO and AIO checklist for 2026: how to optimise a website for Google and AI search

Most guides to AEO, GEO or AI SEO are written to sell a new service. This one is a working checklist, the same one we use on veridiancode.com and on client sites. We checked it against what Google, Microsoft (Bing and Copilot), OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity publish, the largest independent studies and the most-watched videos on the subject, as of 27 October 2026. Where a point is our own advice rather than a source's, we say so. If you only need the definitions, our shorter guide to AEO and GEO vs SEO covers them.
The search companies don't treat these as separate disciplines. Google's guide to optimising for its generative AI features, added on 15 May 2026, files AEO and GEO under SEO and lists the AI-specific tricks it ignores. Microsoft uses the word GEO itself, calling Bing's AI citation report an early step towards GEO tooling, and its guidance makes a similar point: AI answers share the same foundation as ordinary search (crawling, understanding and ranking the web), even though grounding an answer is optimised for a different outcome. So the fundamentals come first, and the AI-specific work sits on top of them.
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