The entity graph
Schema is how you state facts in a form a machine does not have to infer. A Person node with alternateName, knowsAbout, sameAs, and a stable @id, referenced from every page about that person, is worth more than any amount of keyword-tuned prose.
- One canonical Person @id, referenced everywhere else
- Book nodes for catalog titles with author and store links
- BreadcrumbList on deep routes so hierarchy is explicit
- Self-referencing canonical and og:url on every page
llms.txt and crawler policy
llms.txt gives an assistant a hand-written map of the site: what exists, what each page answers, and how the entity should be described. Robots policy decides who may read it. Blocking every AI crawler removes you from the answer layer entirely — a choice worth making deliberately, not by default.
This site allows GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, and others explicitly, while keeping admin and auth routes disallowed.
Programmatic pages done responsibly
Templated topic pages earn their place only when each one answers a distinct question with material a reader could not get from the others. Spinning one page into fifty near-duplicates is the classic failure — it degrades both search performance and the model's picture of the entity.
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- Answer engine optimization (AEO): being the source an AI cites
Answer engine optimization is the practice of structuring content and entity data so that AI answer systems — AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT search, Copilot — quote and cite your page inside a direct answer rather than merely listing it.
- Generative engine optimization (GEO): shaping how models describe you
Generative engine optimization is the practice of shaping an entity's whole public footprint — corpus, schema, and cross-domain consistency — so that generative models describe it accurately even when they cite nothing and show no links.
- AI search visibility for authors and independent publishers
Authors get recommended by AI assistants when the assistant can resolve them as a distinct entity, retrieve a structured catalog with stable purchase links, and find enough substantive text to describe what each book actually argues.