Technical foundations for AEO

If you’ve taken the SEO course, this lesson should feel familiar — and that’s a good thing.

Many of the technical best practices that help search engines crawl and index your site also play a critical role in AEO. The difference is how they’re used.

• For SEO, technical structure helps search engines find and rank your content.
• For AEO, that same structure helps AI systems understand meaning, extract answers, and confidently reference your site in generated responses.

Think of technical foundations as the layer that removes ambiguity. The clearer your site is structurally, the easier it is for AI systems to interpret what your content is actually saying.

Technical wins from SEO that matter even more for AEO

If your site already follows SEO best practices, you’re ahead of the curve for AEO. In particular, these foundations become even more important when AI systems are involved.

• Semantic HTML helps AI understand the role and purpose of each part of a page — not just how it looks. When content is marked up semantically, meaning is easier to extract.
• Clear heading hierarchy gives AI systems a roadmap. Headings signal what a page is about, how sections relate, and where answers live.
• Clean, crawlable structure ensures content is easy to navigate and interpret. Logical URLs, internal linking, and predictable page structure all reduce confusion.
• Fast performance supports reliability. AI systems tend to favor sources that are stable, accessible, and consistently available.

These fundamentals don’t just help your site rank — they help AI systems decide whether your content is usable at all. When structure is inconsistent or unclear, AI has to guess. Strong technical foundations reduce that guesswork.

Once your technical basics are solid, you can introduce AEO-specific signals that help AI systems interpret and prioritize your content more deliberately.

Two of the most important are schema markup and llms.txt.

You don’t need to master these immediately. Think of them as enhancements — not prerequisites.

Schema markup: adding explicit meaning

Schema markup gives AI systems additional context about your content. It helps clarify things like:

• What type of content a page represents
• How entities relate to one another
• Where key facts and definitions live

Schema doesn’t change what users see. It adds structured meaning behind the scenes, making it easier for AI systems to interpret your site accurately.

Watch this brief video to look at how to apply schema in Webflow.

llms.txt: guiding AI access intentionally

llms.txt is an emerging standard that helps site owners communicate directly with AI systems about how their content should be accessed and used.

While still early, this file gives you a way to:

• Signal which parts of your site are most relevant
• Reduce ambiguity around content usage
• Guide AI systems toward authoritative sources

You don’t need to use llms.txt everywhere — but when used intentionally, it can support clearer AI interpretation.

Check out this video to see how to upload a llms.txt file to your site.

Feeling good?

In the next section, we’ll review how to track and analyze AI traffic in Webflow.