anastasiya.studio: a small store vs a marketplace — GEO/AEO wins top rankings and AI citations

Anastasiya.studio is my wife's teaching-materials store and my laboratory at the same time: every hypothesis gets tested here first and only then goes into client projects. The site runs on a custom Django engine — store, cart, orders, blog; before that it was WordPress. Its competitor in search is not another store but TeachersPayTeachers: a marketplace with millions of pages.

First, the biggest failure

An honest case study starts with a mistake. In the WordPress era I failed to noindex the folder with finished products — and about 100 PDFs simply leaked to the web: anyone could download them from search without paying. It is my biggest fail in SEO and development, and also the lesson I now repeat in every project: search hygiene starts on day one of development, not after launch.

January 2026: search had changed, the site had not

Another sales dip coincided with buyers increasingly getting answers not on the results page but in AI answers above it — and the store was not in them. I reworked the site for GEO/AEO along three lines:

• An identity a machine can verify. A reworked About page with real achievements, Person schema markup and — the furthest-reaching step — Wikidata entities for the author and the project. "Who is this and why trust her" is no longer text, it is a verifiable graph a language model can anchor to.
• Answers where people ask. A new home page layout and FAQ blocks written for buyers' actual questions — self-contained passages an answer engine can lift whole.
• Proof instead of promises. A widget with live Google reviews — social proof visible to people and crawlers alike.

The result, six months on

• Top rankings for the niche's high-volume queries — for many of them this family store stands next to TeachersPayTeachers in the results.
• Mentions in zero-click blocks: the brand is visible even when the buyer never clicks at all.
• Direct citations in AI answers — language models reference the store as a source.

The point of this case: visibility in AI answers is not a privilege of giants. A small site with a verifiable author identity, honest answers and real reviews competes with a marketplace exactly where the purchase is decided. This is the same playbook — entities, markup, citable passages — I apply in client GEO/AEO projects.

Maxim Safianov

I work at the intersection of technical SEO and software engineering: helping sites stay visible for classic search and AI answers alike, and building the Python tooling that automates it.