Yesterday I ran a 5-pass AEO/SEO/GEO/AIO audit on the same site, fixed 64 surfaces in one sitting, and watched the composite probe score climb from 70 to 94. This is the dev-tactical playbook of what actually moved the needle, with the exact files and probes.

The premise: traditional SEO (links, meta tags, sitemaps) is necessary but no longer sufficient. AI Overview, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude pull from a different surface area — /.well-known/ , llms.txt , agent-card.json , openapi.json , and structured schema.org JSON-LD with Speakable + QAPage + Service types.

If your tool isn't shipping these, you're invisible to half the LLMs that ought to be citing you.

The 5-pass audit loop

I ran a single-day chain of:

Probe — a checklist of "if I were an LLM scraping for an answer to X , what file would I open?" — across 7 categories: discovery, schema, content, well-known, structured-Q&A, citations, and identity.

Score each category 0–100.

Diff the lowest-scoring against the spec.

Ship the fixes (mostly…