· updated
What is generative engine optimization for a developer site?
GEO structures your pages so ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews can quote accurate answer capsules about you, your stack, and your labs.
By Théo Marini · geo, seo, content
What is generative engine optimization for a developer site?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your site easy for AI answer engines to retrieve, trust, and cite. For a developer portfolio, that means clear entity pages, question-shaped headings, and 40–80 word answer capsules backed by schema.
How do answer capsules work?
Lead each major section with a self-contained statement that still makes sense if lifted alone. Models quote passages, not whole articles. Pair capsules with FAQPage and Article JSON-LD including dateModified.
Which technical signals matter most?
Allow reputable AI crawlers in robots.txt, publish /llms.txt, keep content in SSR HTML, and maintain a Person entity with sameAs links to GitHub and your primary domain. Freshness via dateModified helps engines prefer updated notes.
How often should you audit?
A weekly audit-action loop works well: crawl rendered HTML, score schema and capsules, run a fixed prompt set against ChatGPT/Perplexity, then open a PR that only touches content and metadata.
FAQ
Is GEO different from SEO? It overlaps heavily. Classic SEO rankings still feed many AI Overviews; GEO emphasizes extractability and citation accuracy.
Do I need paid GEO tools? Not at portfolio scale. Structured MDX, schema, and a recurring agent PR are enough for early signal.