AIO/GEO "Best Practices" - What's actually working for AIO/GEO optimization vs what everyone just keeps repeating?
I've been seeing a lot of confident takes about AI Overviews and GEO lately. Things like, answer questions in the first paragraph, target conversational queries, build topical authority, use schema aggressively, get cited by high-authority sources, E-E-A-T signals, FAQ sections with exact-match formatting. The list goes on.
But I've also read in a few places that a lot of this is just correlation, that the sites getting cited in AIO were already strong before GEO was even a conversation, and most of the "optimization" people are doing isn't really the reason they're getting picked up.
To all the experienced experts, what's genuinely moving the needle for you? Are you writing for the AI or just writing really good content, and it happens to get pulled in AI overviews?