Custom CMS GEO Guidelines

On a custom or headless stack you own whether a page arrives as text, which is the property every hosted platform decides for you and the one that makes everything downstream possible. Make the rendering decision per route rather than per application: the pages a buyer reads before deciding, usually under thirty of them, should be server-rendered or generated, while dashboards and configurators can assemble in the browser because nothing will cite them. You also own the head and the status codes, so a removed page can return 410 rather than a soft 404. In a headless setup saving is not publishing: a build, a cache expiry or a revalidation stands between the two, so check the live response rather than the preview. Put four checks in the build, because these failures are silent rather than difficult: the answer appears in the built response for a named list of routes, nothing is noindexed by accident, the sitemap holds what you expect, and numbers still carry sources; keep anything that calls an assistant out, because varying answers make an intermittent test. And the content model decides what a page of a type can say, so add four fields: a required summary written as an answer, an author reference rather than a string, a date for the claim separate from the publish date, and a source beside any figure.