Is your CMS ready for AEO and GEO?

Many digital marketing teams are now actively thinking about or even working through the slightly esoteric and still evolving world of Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). It’s a topic we've covered previously in posts about SEO in the age of AI, and getting started with GEO and AEO.

Much of the focus of team thinking about the SEO is the content and how to optimise it accordingly – adding structure and some FAQs, for example. But an important aspect that can get overlooked is to ensure that your Content Management System (CMS) or Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is optimised and configured to support GEO or AEO. Here there is actually some overlap with SEO as many of the elements that can be improved help with that too, so really the title of the blog should probably be “Is your CMS ready for AEO, GEO and SEO?”.

What AI engines look for

Unlike the static training data that LLMs were originally built on, many AI tools now retrieve web content in real time when generating answers (this is known as Retrieval Augmented Generation or RAG).

The different AI engines and associated LLMs take cues and signals from the way content is structured, coded and any underlying markup in order to understand your content and how authoritative is. This helps determine the chance of it being cited as a source in an answer from an LLM.

The technical set up and configuration of your CMS is therefore really about maximizing these “cues and signals” to help the LLM interpret your content and removing any associated barriers for content owners and editors. It can make a significant difference, and it is worth focusing on.

Here are some of the elements that AI engines from Claude to ChatGPT to Gemini are looking for.

Schema markup

Schema markup can be defined as structured code added to your pages that tells AI and search tools what your content represents. Schema markup covers areas such as:

• HowTo: Defines instructional content.
• FAQPage: Shows where there are FAQs.
• Article: Defines editorial or an article.
• Organisation: Points to core information about an organisation or company.
• LocalBusiness: Includes locational data about a business.
• Service: Provides details of services that an organisation provides.

The mark-up gives an AI engine confidence that your content is what it thinks it is and that makes it more likely to be cited. It’s also worth noting that you need to ensure the schema mark-up is correct, especially as errors can have an adverse impact.

Headings

Getting your heading structures in place – adding those H1, H2 and H3s to reflect a logical hierarchy of your content and signal what different sections refer to has – been a staple of SEO for a long time, as well as establishing the right formatting to drive an attractive experience.

Ensuring you have logical headings in place that have the right level tagging on it helps an AI to understand how a page is organised and work out the main topics and sub-topics. It really helps with GEO and AEO.

If your use of headings is a little loose, for example you are using uniform headings throughout a post, or they are inconsistent across different pages, or the relationship between H2 and H3 has no relations to topics and sub-topics, then there are likely opportunities to optimise your content, and to configure your CMS to help support better headings use.

Structured content

You’ll notice a theme here: adding mark-up, getting your headings in order. These are all approaches that add structure to your content. Other structured formats such as FAQs, comparison tables and step-by-step guides also aid AEO and GEO.

Page speed and Core Web Vitals

We have previously covered Core Web Vitals and its importance in SEO. These are what Google regards as three core measures that map specific areas of page experience in detail; it largely concerns page loading performance and speed. While the details around Core Web Vitals have changed since our last post (for example, ‘First Input Delay” has been replaced by ‘Interaction to Next Paint’), the Vitals also now have an impact on GEO. Essentially a slow or unstable page is less likely to be prioritised as a source by an AI.

Robots.txt and sitemap

This is a basic, but you need to ensure that AI bots can access and index your website content in the first place and are not blocking any of agents or crawlers used by AI search tools. This means checking you have the right robots.txt file in place and also that your sitemap is correctly set up and all up to date. This is also a fundamental for SEO, but it can get missed from time to time.

It is also worth being aware of llms.txt which is an emerging standard similar to robots.txt. This provides AI tools with a guide to your content and the pages to treat as authoritative; however currently adoption has been patchy and there are disagreements about whether it actually makes a difference.

On a related note, it is also worth checking any Cloudflare or equivalent settings to check if it is inadvertently automatically blocking any AI bots or crawlers. Cloudflare changed its default settings in 2025 to block AI bots, and it can catch people out.

Configuring your CMS for GEO

Configuring and optimising your CMS means setting it up in a way that helps deliver all of the five above elements – Schema markup, Headings, Structured Content Formats, Core Web Vitals and elements for ‘crawlability’ – and removes barriers to making it happen.

For example, some of these ways can happen, include:

Allow marketers and editors to add schema mark-up to content

Adding or editing schema mark-up can be quite technical and feel complex, which can be off-putting for some marketers and non-technical editors, although it is quite straightforward. There may be the potential to configure or customise the editing experience in your CMS to enable a far more straightforward way to add appropriate schema mark-up to different content types.

Creating structured content fields

One way to encourage more GEO-friendly contributions to a page such as FAQs can be to create a structured field to enter this information, rather than it living within a free-text area and entered through a WYSIWIG editor. Here relevant schema mark-up could be added.

Use page templates or establish content blocks to create and manage structured content formats

You can make it easy for your content editors by establishing page templates or standard content blocks or components that encourage the kind of structured content that AI tools love. When this happens, adding a comparison table becomes straightforward rather than complex.

Managing heading hierarchies

Hierarchies of headings can often be design-driven rather than being shaped around the content structure. There are some ways to support better heading use such as establishing templates and rules, making it clearer whether an H2 or H3 setting has been applied and so on.

Site performance and set-up

Your agency should be configuring your CMS and hosting arrangements to make sure they are optimised for SEO and GEO in terms of Core Web Vitals, as well as ensuring robots.txt and the sitemap is all set up.

Optimising your CMS for the age of AI

The way your CMS is set up makes a difference to SEO, AEO and GEO. If you'd like to discuss optimising it to improve your visibility across AI tools, then get in touch!