How We Write SEO + AEO Blog Posts in 2026 That Actually Get Crawled by Google and AI Bots

This may be of interest or may not be….

We run an engineering firm in the US and have been laser-focused on creating blog content that performs for both traditional search engines and AI bots (ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, etc.).

Note: This has replaced the need for a 5-figure Google Ad cost. Blogging is a minimal-cost effort and produces results if done correctly.

Here’s the exact framework we now use for every new post:

Our Current KPIs for Every Blog Post

• Meta Title ≤ 60 characters
• Meta Description ≤ 160 characters
• Selection of high-interest search topics based on data, not your gut feeling
• Only H2 and H3 headings (no walls of text)
• Heavy use of bullet points and numbered lists (AEO-friendly)
• Keep total reading time under 2 minutes
• Internal links to other relevant pages on the site (homepage, service pages, reference guides, contact)
• FAQ JSON-LD structured data at the bottom
• Organization JSON-LD script (state-specific) and FAQ

We deliberately avoid long conversational writing.

AI bots and search engine learning bots mostly crawl the homepage and our most popular blog posts.

For the organic searches/traffic we're chasing, following the above format has earned us top ranking in the markets we compete in.

A big note to say is that page ranking is a long-term effort (at least 6 months and more realistically a year) that is consistently executed and measured by true and accurate analytics (with noise filtered out)

If using AI, develop the knowledge base first before generating blog posts to avoid garbage-in-garbage-out scenarios. Proper use of AI has cut a post generation from 1-2 hours to roughly 15 mins.

So every new post is built to be easily parsed and cited. This approach has dramatically increased our visibility in AI answers and Google results.

Would love to hear your current checklist or any tweaks you’ve made in 2026.