Site architecture: one moment, one page
The architecture that wins is flat and question-shaped: a hub for each major topic, one dedicated page per buying moment beneath it, and clean crawl paths from your strongest pages to your newest. Avoid burying answers inside mega-guides; assistants cite pages that own a question, and a 6,000-word omnibus dilutes twenty citable answers into none.
On-page structure that machines parse
One H1 stating the question in buyer language. The direct answer in the first two sentences under it. H2s for each follow-up question, phrased as questions. Real HTML lists and tables for anything comparative, since assistants lift tabular facts eagerly. Named entities spelled consistently, your brand, products and category described identically here and everywhere else. And visible dates, updated when content genuinely changes.
Schema: the non-negotiables
FAQPage on every page with question-style H2s, mirroring the visible text exactly. Article with author and dates on editorial pages. Organization with consistent name, logo and sameAs links site-wide. Product or Service where relevant. Skip schema spam: markup that does not match visible content erodes exactly the machine trust you are building. Validate after every template change.
Internal linking and the crawl reality
Every new answer page needs at least two internal links from crawlable, indexed pages within days of publishing: a hub link and a contextual link from a related answer. Server-rendered links beat JavaScript-injected ones, because several assistants read raw HTML. Footer and hub links carry the weight; orphaned pages simply never enter the citation pool. Run your structure through the free Aethon GEO Grader for a twenty-point readiness score, or the free audit to see which pages assistants already quote.
