Your users increasingly don't scroll ten blue links anymore. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overview a question and read one synthesized answer. For that answer to mention your site, a machine has to crawl it, parse it, and decide your content is worth quoting.
That whole pipeline is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — and a surprising amount of it lives in the part of the stack developers own, not the marketing team.
Here's the one-line version: treat AI crawlers like a browser that never runs your JavaScript, and hand them clean, server-rendered, well-structured HTML. Everything below unpacks what that means in practice.
Meet the bots already hitting your server
Open your access logs and you'll find a new class of user-agents. They fall into two jobs:
