Structuring Your Site for AI Optimization (AEO)

How a strong technical foundation helps your content get seen in AI search.

Even the best content will fail if the technical foundation underneath it is weak.
In our previous article, we covered the Content side of AEO and how to write pages that both people and machines find useful. But great content on top of a fragile technical structure will still be invisible to answer engines and AI assistants.

This is where the Technical category comes in. It is the part of AEO that helps Large Language Models interpret your site correctly, supports your Authority efforts, and increases the value of every piece of content you publish.

And there is a real gap in adoption. Research shows that while more than 70 percent of Google page-one results use schema markup, nearly 90 percent of all websites use no schema at all. This leaves enormous room for early movers to gain meaningful visibility with relatively small improvements.

In this post, we break down five stages of technical maturity. You will see how teams move from basic site hygiene to automated technical AEO, with questions to evaluate your current level and steps to advance to the next one. This gives you a roadmap for strengthening your technical foundation, improving AI visibility, and driving more qualified discovery.

If you want to know where your brand stands today, use these stages as a practical assessment. Or reach out to ZINC to conduct a full AEO Technical Audit, which we include in our optimization programs.

If you take away one thing

Add metadata that helps AI understand your content. Structured data is one of the strongest signals you can give to answer engines and one of the fastest ways to increase visibility.

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Level 1: Optimize on-page SEO

At this stage, teams focus on basic discoverability. Crawling is how search engines and AI systems find your pages. Indexing is how they decide what to surface. Without proper metadata, a significant portion of your work can be lost.

Level 1 is about getting the fundamentals right. Clean URLs. Clear hierarchy. Basic keyword alignment. Secure pages that resolve with HTTPS. Accurate metadata including title tags, descriptions, and headers. A working robots.txt file. Sites at this stage may not be fast or structured, but the essentials are present.

Goal to advance:

Get the basics in place and introduce simple structure so LLMs can read your content with less confusion.

Questions to ask:

• Where are our biggest SEO hygiene gaps
• Which high traffic pages need better structure
• Which pages should receive schema first

How to get started:

• Audit crawlability and indexing across devices
• Fix broken links
• Improve site architecture so both search engines and AI crawlers can understand it
• Strengthen content structure with:
  • Clean headings that match common questions
  • Short summaries at the top
  • Bulleted lists and numbered steps
  • Table of contents for long pages
  • Callouts and FAQs
  • Metadata written for real queries, not only keywords

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Level 2: Set up page structure

Now the focus expands from fundamentals to machine-readable structure. Schema markup helps search engines and AI assistants understand what your page contains. It applies to products, articles, FAQs, events, and almost every content type.

This level also reinforces on-page patterns that help LLMs extract meaning. That includes consistent heading structure, summaries near the top, clear groupings of information, and FAQs at the end of deeper content.

Goal to advance:

Use structured metadata consistently across your top pages and prepare the foundation for more advanced improvements.

Questions to ask:

• Are we using structured on-page content across important pages
• Is our site secure and available at least 99.9 percent of the time
• Are we meeting accessibility standards

How to get started:

• Add schema markup to your top 20 pages, then expand until coverage reaches at least 75 percent
• Validate structured data using Google’s Rich Results test
• Maintain a clear heading hierarchy with one H1 and logical H2, H3, and H4 levels
• Ensure sitemap.xml includes all key pages, with modified dates and priority levels
• Reach at least 95 percent accessibility coverage
• Keep crawlability near 100 percent
• Strengthen security across hosting and applications
• Use canonical tags to clarify the primary version of each page
• If possible, ensure that critical content is server-rendered, since some AI crawlers still struggle to interpret Javascript

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Level 3: Maintain consistency and speed

At Level 3, the challenge becomes scaling structure across the entire site while ensuring performance remains high. Pages now contain reliable patterns that LLMs can interpret. Schema is present across most of the site. Content structure follows predictable logic. And the technical environment is both fast and stable.

Security goes deeper than HTTPS. Teams maintain up-to-date packages, run firewalls and TLS, block automated attacks, and manage threats. The sitemap is comprehensive, clean, and kept current.

Goal to advance:

Scale structured content without losing clarity or user experience.

Questions to ask:

• Which areas of the site are hardest for AI crawlers to interpret
• Are we making sure Bing indexes our updates, since ChatGPT relies heavily on it
• How are we staying current with changing AEO standards

How to get started:

• Use schema on almost every page, including nested schema for relationship clarity
• Conduct quarterly technical audits
• Use semantic HTML that is readable by both users and bots
• Adopt IndexNow to increase freshness ranking in Bing and surfaces in ChatGPT

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Level 4: Automate site structure

At this level, teams optimize for human visitors, AI pre-training, and real-time AI search simultaneously. To maintain complete schema and accessibility coverage, automation becomes necessary.

Nested schema clarifies relationships between pages, entities, and products. Accessibility becomes consistent across the entire site. Clean code makes pages lightweight and easier for AI systems to parse. Standards like IndexNow are in use, and teams are preparing for emerging protocols like llms.txt as they mature.

Goal to advance:

Use automation and infrastructure improvements to scale performance and visibility.

Questions to ask:

• How are we automating structured data generation

How to get started:

• Redirect hallucinated or mistyped URLs that AI systems sometimes generate
• ‍Automate schema creation across all templates
• Improve global speed through CDNs and optimized assets

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Level 5: Adopt next generation standards

At Level 5, organizations stay ahead by adopting new standards early. This includes llms.txt, which guides answer engine crawlers, and MCP servers that allow agents to interact directly with key features.

Technical foundations are no longer static. They evolve with the broader AI ecosystem. Brands at this stage gain advantages because they are prepared long before these standards become commonplace.

Goal to advance:

Maintain maturity by balancing experimentation with proven practice.

Questions to ask:

• Which new standards should we test to stay ahead
• How do we balance innovation with the resources needed to scale
• How do we detect and redirect LLM hallucination traffic

How to get started:

• Pilot llms.txt
• Explore MCP servers when appropriate
• Continue global improvements to performance, structure, and accessibility
• Redirect hallucinated URLs that appear in referral logs

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Strengthen your technical foundation for AEO

Technical maturity is an ongoing process. You begin with core SEO basics, layer in structured data, improve performance, automate wherever possible, and eventually adopt emerging standards that move the industry forward. Each step strengthens your Content and Authority strategies, improves your visibility in AI search, and ensures your best work is actually seen.

ZINC helps organizations build this foundation. We develop AEO strategies that align content, structure, and authority so your brand is visible in the new world of AI-driven discovery.

If you want clarity on where your organization stands today, ZINC can guide you through a full technical AEO assessment and build a roadmap for growth.

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