Technical setup

The foundations before any content: measurement tools, speed, and how bots and AIs access your site.

11 lessons

  1. 01

    Why everything starts with the technical layer

    Without indexability, decent speed and open crawler access, neither SEO nor GEO can work: the technical layer is the entry condition, not an optional extra.

  2. 02

    Installing and configuring Google Search Console

    Ownership verification, domain vs URL-prefix property, sitemap submission: the concrete steps to get started with Google Search Console.

  3. 03

    Reading your Google Search Console data

    Performance, Indexing, Sitemaps, Core Web Vitals: how to read these four Search Console reports and cross-reference them to prioritize fixes.

  4. 04

    Auditing your site with generative AI + GSC data

    Exporting your Search Console data and feeding it to a generative AI with the right prompt gets you a prioritized list of technical fixes.

  5. 05

    Installing Bing Webmaster Tools

    Bing matters for your visibility in Copilot. Direct import from Google Search Console or manual verification: the steps to get set up.

  6. 06

    Installing Google Analytics 4

    Property, data stream, tracking code, consent management: a clean GA4 setup to reliably measure traffic generated by AI engines.

  7. 07

    Configuring GA4: the reports that actually matter

    Isolating referral traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini in GA4 with a custom channel, and tracking how it evolves over time.

  8. 08

    Site speed and Core Web Vitals

    LCP, INP, CLS: what Core Web Vitals measure, how to test them with PageSpeed Insights, and which fixes to prioritize first.

  9. 09

    The robots.txt file and controlling AI crawlers

    GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended: robots.txt syntax and how to decide whether to allow or block each AI crawler.

  10. 10

    The llms.txt file and the XML sitemap

    What llms.txt actually is, what it delivers today, how to write one, and the XML sitemap best practices still worth getting right.

  11. 11

    AI crawlers: who reads you, and why

    Training vs real-time retrieval: an overview of the major AI crawlers and how to spot them directly in your server logs.