Why we did this to our own blog
We spend all day telling marketers that GEO is structural work — that engines reward pages built to be read, cited, and extracted. Meanwhile this blog was shipping as one long column of HTML and nothing else. Physician, heal thyself. So we treated the blog like a client: audited what an engine could actually extract from it, and shipped the gaps.
The checklist we shipped
Every item below is live on the post you're reading. Steal the list — none of it is proprietary, and all of it transfers to any site with articles.
- A markdown twin of every post. Add .md to any post URL and you get the whole article as plain markdown — headings, links, tables, everything. Engines that fetch pages get clean structure with zero boilerplate, which makes the content easier to quote and cheaper to read.
- An llms.txt map. Our llms.txt now lists every post with a one-line description, linking straight to the markdown twins. It's a curated index for machines, the way a sitemap is for crawlers.
- The answer first. Each post opens with the short answer — literally labeled — and ships it as FAQ structured data. Engines love an extractable question-and-answer pair; readers in a hurry love it too. Same work, both audiences.
- Structured data on everything. Article, breadcrumbs, and author markup on every post, so engines don't have to guess who published what, when.
- RSS, still. Retro, yes. But aggregators, monitoring tools, and more than one AI crawler still read feeds, and it costs one route to serve them.
- Real screenshots with real alt text. Product shots are captured fresh from the live site by a script, so they never go stale — and every one carries alt text that says what's actually on screen, because engines index the description, not the pixels.
Show receipts
The other thing we shipped is a way to quote engines directly. When we claim an engine names a shortlist, we can now show the actual answer — engine, prompt, date, verbatim — pulled from our own sweeps. Like this one:
