5 mistakes I would have avoided if I'd known about GEO

If I could go back in time, I'd change 5 things about e-Slovénie. Not the content. Not the design. The technical foundation.

My site is 20 years old. 652 pages. I had to rebuild everything to get cited by AI. It worked: 327 Copilot citations, cited by Google AI Mode. But I could have avoided months of work.

1. No structured data from the start

For 20 years, zero JSON-LD. AI couldn't tell if my pages were guides, itineraries, or blog posts. Fix: on Plat du Jour, every page has its schema from creation.

2. SEO-optimized content that wasn't citable

I used to write "Chicago, the Windy City, is a must-visit destination in the Midwest." AI doesn't cite that. It cites facts: dates, numbers, names, coordinates. Fix: every restaurant listing contains structured factual data.

3. No guidance for AI crawlers

My robots.txt only spoke to Googlebot. But GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot? Ignored. Fix: llms.txt + adapted robots.txt from day 1.

4. A monolingual site for years

My content was only in French. But AI answers in the user's language. A Spanish-speaking tourist asking "mejores restaurantes cerca de Times Square" couldn't find my site. Fix: Plat du Jour launches in 3 languages with proper hreflang tags.

5. No dynamic sitemap

My WordPress sitemap was static and often outdated. AI crawlers couldn't find my new pages. Fix: automatically generated sitemap, updated daily.

The lesson

These 5 mistakes cost me months of rebuilding. The good news: if you're launching a site today, you can do everything right from the start.

GEO isn't an audit you do after the fact. It's a foundation you lay before.