SEO · Interactive guide
What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the work of making a site easy for search engines to find, understand and choose. Before a page shows up on Google it goes through five stages: crawling, rendering, indexing, ranking, and now possibly being cited in AI answers.
Play SEO Road Trip: Crawly drives a kart through five regions. Drive through skill gates, avoid bug bots and climb from rank #100 to #1.
Game · Interactive guide
SEO Road Trip
Crawly is ready to drive. Take your page through five regions to the AI lighthouse: drive through skill gates to climb the ranking, avoid the bug bots.
Region
Rank #100
Speed 0 km/j
The five stages every page goes through
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01Crawl
How does Google find your pages?
Googlebot explores the web by following links from pages it already knows, helped by XML sitemaps. Pages with no incoming links (orphans) are hard to find, and robots.txt controls which parts may be crawled.
One important detail: robots.txt limits crawling, not indexing. To keep a page out of search results, use noindex.
What I do at this stage
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02Render
What does Google see when it opens a page?
Google runs pages in a Chromium browser to see the final content. Content already in the initial HTML is read straight away; content that only appears through JavaScript has to wait for rendering and is easier to miss.
That is why this site is statically rendered: all text is already in the HTML. Speed is measured here too, through Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS).
What I do at this stage
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03Index
How does a page get into Google’s index?
Once understood, a page is stored in the index, Google’s enormous library. When several URLs carry nearly the same content, Google picks one canonical version; rel=canonical and structured data help it choose and understand correctly.
Unmanaged duplicates split signals across several URLs. Search Console shows which pages are indexed, and why when they are not.
What I do at this stage
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04Rank
Why does one page outrank another?
For every search, Google orders indexed pages by relevance and quality: how well the content answers the question, how trusted the source is, and the page experience, including speed.
In the real world, content relevance and quality matter most; authority and speed help too. Google uses hundreds of signals and does not publish its formula.
What I do at this stage
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05AI
How does a site get cited in AI answers?
AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search and Perplexity build answers from indexed pages and link their sources. Google says no special optimisation is needed beyond good SEO, so AEO and GEO extend technical SEO; they are not shortcuts.
What helps: a direct answer up front, entities and schema consistent with the visible text, and original data nobody else has.
What I do at this stage
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?
SEO gets a site found and ranked in search results. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) focuses on direct-answer formats such as featured snippets. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) focuses on being cited in AI answers. All three stand on the same technical SEO foundation.
How long does SEO take to show results?
Usually months, not days. Google’s own guidance says SEO improvements typically take four months to a year to show their benefit, depending on the site and the competition.
Do Core Web Vitals affect rankings?
Yes, as part of the page experience signals, but content relevance and quality still matter more. Speed shows its impact most on users: slow pages get abandoned more often.
Is WordPress good for SEO?
WordPress is a strong foundation for SEO, but the outcome depends on the theme, plugins, server speed and content structure. A heavy, messy WordPress site can still lose to a simple, tidy one.
Does a site need an llms.txt file?
It is optional. Google says no special file is needed to appear in its AI features. llms.txt is cheap to add, but it should not be treated as a ranking factor.
Want your site to pass all five stages?
This is my day job: from crawl budget to AI citations.