AEO/GEO for Developer Tools: Win in AI-Powered Search
Over the past year, we’ve seen a pretty big shift in how developers discover, evaluate, and adopt new tools.
Traditional SEO still matters—but increasingly, devs are turning to AI-powered chat interfaces, code generation tools, and AI agents to help them decide which technologies to use and how to use them. Stack Overflow’s most recent data show nearly 65% of developers are using AI tools weekly or more frequently in their workflows, and with the preponderance of developer tools integrating AI features, I only see this number increasing in 2026.
This shift in developer behavior is giving rise to a new kind of content optimization: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). In 2025, if you want your developer tool to show up in AI-generated recommendations, you’ll need to adapt your content strategy.
The good news?
If you’ve been producing high-quality, technical content already, you’re not starting from scratch. You just need to tweak your approach. The delta between how search engines view your content and how LLMs view your content is not that big.We’ve been helping clients at Draft.dev navigate this transition all year, so I wanted to share a bit about what we’ve learned. If you have anything to add or questions, I’d love to hear from you; feel free to reach out anytime: [email protected].
- 65% of developers now use AI tools weekly for discovery and decisions
- Content freshness matters more than domain age in AI recommendations
- Brand mentions outweigh backlinks for LLM visibility
- Structured content wins: FAQs, comparisons, and clear formatting
- Human expertise still essential: AI-only content gets 5.4x less traffic
In the meantime, let’s see where things are today:
Table of Contents
- AEO/GEO for Developer Tools: How to Stay Visible as Devs Shift to AI
What Matters (and What Doesn’t) in GEO/AEO
Many of the old rules of SEO still apply: create high quality content, target topics that users are searching (or asking) for, and make sure your content is getting shared organically as much as possible. All these things matter, but there are some new priorities worth paying attention to.
What matters most in GEO/AEO?
Freshness of Content
AI models tend to favor recently published or updated content. This is a shift from traditional SEO, where older, authoritative pages often win. This is especially interesting in developer content where out-of-date content that is now inaccurate is almost worse than no content at all as it erodes reader trust in your brand. We highly recommend considering technical content refreshes at least once a year.)
Article Structure
Formatting is more important than ever. This may be because LLMs aren’t as good at crawling and inferring meaning from content as the more mature crawlers search engines use, but AI tools seem to prefer pages that are:
- Skimmable (high-level summaries or bullet points at the top)
- Structured (use tables and matrixes for comparisons)
- Self-explaining sections (be aware of chunking)
- Conclusive (key takeaways or FAQs at the bottom)
- Well linked (internally and externally)
Most of these structural points are good for readers and SEO as well, so this is just a win all-around.
Schema.org Metadata
Structured data still plays a role, especially for helping machines understand your content. This requires some technical implementation, but ensuring your website includes a simple organization schema, along with FAQ and blog posting schemas, can help your content be better parsed by AI.
External Brand Mentions
In a world where LLMs train on massive datasets from across the web, brand mentions seem to weigh more heavily than backlinks. This means that content mentioning your brand positively across a variety of platforms is key to showing up more often in LLMs.
We’ve been helping clients focus on content that mentions them in:
- Newsletters that are published online
- Personal, partner, and user blogs
- Dev-focused platforms like Hashnode and Dev.to
- Reddit comments (not just link drops)
This is a great opportunity for smaller brands to catch up with the established players who may have stronger backlink profiles, but less focus on external content today.
Comparisons and Roundups Around the Internet
More than ever, your goal for content should be to guide LLMs towards the category your tool fits in, and the specific use cases where it’s superior. As developers interact with chat tools and ask progressively more specific questions, you want to make sure that your brand is present in those specific contexts to make sure LLMs have made those associations.
This is where direct comparisons (“Us vs. Them”) and roundups (“10 Best Tools for X”) come in. At Draft.dev, we’ve got dedicated engineers walking through your product and your competitor’s that then can write technical comparisons and roundups for you. While these have always been valuable SEO pieces, they’re also valuable GEO pieces as they can guide LLMs towards your tools’ strengths and make them aware of its limitations.
Finally, if this kind of content only lives on your site, you’re missing out. Publishing derivative versions of these posts on third-party sites can help your product surface more often in AI-powered recommendations.
What doesn’t matter as much in GEO/AEO?
Domain Age or Rating
Authority metrics like domain age or Moz DA don’t seem to carry as much weight in LLMs rankings. My suspicion is that this will change as they build their own version of domain authority, but we’ll see.
Traditional Backlinking
While still useful for SEO, the LLMs driving answer engines are not as focused on the quality and quantity of external backlinks at the moment. Positive brand mentions matter, but backlinks to specific content pieces less so.
High Volume, Low Quality, Pure AI-Generated Content
Publishing mass-generated content with no human oversight isn’t going to cut it. Generative AI tools are useful for speeding up workflows, but SME-led technical content still wins when it comes to accuracy and usefulness. Human-written content generates 5.4x more traffic than AI-generated content, so while AI can create a lot of output, the quality of that output varies wildly.
Content Strategies That Are Changing With GEO/AEO
Because of the way LLMs work and the increased usage we’re seeing among developers, the content strategies we’re working with clients to build are changing as well. While no two developer content strategies are the same, there are some general trends I can point to now.
Which content strategies work best for GEO/AEO?
Comparisons and Roundups
As I mentioned above, these are gold. Create content that compares your product with others in the space honestly and accurately. Post one version on your site, and tailor different versions for other platforms (e.g., Dev.to, Medium, partners’ blogs, Reddit comments, etc.) to ensure LLMs associate your product with others being suggested.
Tutorials and Use Cases
AI code generation tools are often guided by examples. Well-written, up-to-date, and accurate tutorials showing how to use your product (especially in real-world scenarios) are highly valuable to LLMs. This is also the case for refreshing your tutorials regularly to ensure they stay accurate.
Industry-Specific Guides
Chat-based AI tools heavily adapt their responses to the user’s industry, chat context, and previous questions. This means that content that showcases the strengths your product has in specific verticals (fintech, healthcare, dataops, etc.) can help capture niche questions like, “What Devops tools are often used in healthtech” or “what tools help financial tech companies manage security and regulations?”
Amplify Your Brand Mentions and PR
Finally, many of our clients are focusing on brand mentions through partnerships, paid placements, or influencer content. The goal is to produce content that gets people talking about your tool in places LLMs are likely to crawl.
Which strategies should be avoided in GEO/AEO?
“What Is X?” Content
These might still help your brand show up in AI-generated definitions, but they’re not likely to drive conversions. The click-through value is falling on this sort of high-level content as AI summaries get prioritized in Google searches and chat-based AI interfaces.
Gated Content Without an Indexable Version
I’ve always been a believer in releasing a gated and an ungated version of every downloadable asset, and now that LLMs are indexing and using your content to respond to users, this is even more important. If you’re using gated content for lead gen, that’s fine, but make sure there’s also a crawlable, ungated version, especially for data-rich whitepapers. Otherwise, you’re invisible to answer engines.
Relying Entirely on AI-Generated Content
We use AI to brainstorm, check multiple sources, find specific research, create summaries, and spin content for multiple platforms, but we still need expert humans involved. Real insight from exprienced developers is what separates truly valuable content from fluff.
How Can Teams Adapt to GEO/AEO without Starting from Scratch?
If you’ve already invested in content marketing and SEO, you’re ahead of the game. AEO/GEO isn’t about reinventing the wheel—it’s about optimizing your content strategy for the way developers are using AI tools and making decisions today.
So what should you do?
- Keep creating high-quality, technically helpful content
- Update your content regularly, especially tutorials and documentation, to keep them fresh
- Optimize structure and metadata across your content
- Build brand awareness across multiple platforms
- Get your community involved to spread brand mentions on other public platforms
At Draft.dev, we can help you make this transition. Our team of software engineers, developer marketers, writers, and editors creates developer-focused content that can help you reach your marketing goals. Whether you’re focused on traditional search engines, answer engines, or simply product marketing for your existing users, we can help build the strategy and production support you need to get the most ROI from every piece.
Ready to start showing up where it counts? Let’s talk.