README

GEO Starter is a Drupal CMS site-template scaffold for teams moving from headless/composable or legacy page/post CMS stacks into a governed foundation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). It provides sourceable services, answers, articles, and evidence records designed to be readable by humans and inspectable by retrieval systems.

This scaffold is intentionally lean. The Starter Kit/DDEV spike proved that drush site:export can generate a valid site template after a Drupal CMS site is installed, but raw export output from the default non-interactive Starter template was too broad for the Community alpha. This package starts from the verified type: Site and drupal-recipe shape instead.

Status

Community alpha scaffold. Not Marketplace-ready.

Current Scope

Drupal CMS recipe package shape.
Core modules needed for content modeling, moderation, JSON:API retrieval proof, media, taxonomy, paths, and views.
Drupal CMS admin, media, privacy, and basic SEO recipes.
Required package dependencies for Canvas and Paragraphs authoring lanes.
One Canvas Page shell and one proof Paragraph type, geo_starter_section, with field_sections attached to Service, Answer, and Article nodes.
Core Olivero as the basic public frontend theme for alpha rendering.
MVP content model config for Service, Answer, Article, Evidence Source, Audience and Topic.
Public-service sample content: 4 Services, 8 Answers, 3 Articles, 6 Evidence Sources, and seeded taxonomy terms.
Planning docs now frame the starter as a migration destination for headless/composable and page/post CMS patterns; importer automation is not included yet.
Representative screenshot.webp captured from the rendered sample Service page in the alpha acceptance site.

GEO Readiness

This section shows what the Community alpha supports now, what is partial, and what is still planned. It focuses on capabilities a content platform needs when search engines and AI systems decide what to cite.

Content structure and operations

Capability	Status	What proves it today
Structured content model	Yes	Typed Service, Answer, Article, and Evidence Source entities with shared fields and controlled Topic and Audience vocabularies.
Composable content operations	Partial	Typed content, taxonomy, entity references, moderation, JSON:API, and one reusable `geo_starter_section` Paragraph type. Views and editor dashboards are not built yet.
Editorial governance	Yes	Draft → needs-review → published → archived moderation workflow across all four content types, with reviewed-date provenance.

Retrieval and rendering output

Capability	Status	What proves it today
Rendered semantic HTML	Partial	Structured node pages and a Paragraph section render through core Olivero. Final theme and semantic-template review remain open.
Schema.org / metadata from fields	Planned	A schema map exists; JSON-LD is deferred until rendered-content parity is proven. The recipe does not emit structured-data claims the visible page cannot support.
Structured API access	Yes	JSON:API (core) with published/draft access proven on a fresh install. This is a machine-readable integration surface — not, by itself, the channel through which answer engines form citations (those read rendered pages and the public web).

Agent and ownership readiness

Capability	Status	What proves it today
Agent / tool protocol story	Planned	Drupal AI and agent paths are documented as future integration surfaces; no write-capable agent workflow ships in the alpha.
AI provider choice	Open	The recipe configures no AI provider; provider choice stays an open Drupal AI integration decision, with no proprietary runtime.
Open ownership / no lock-in	Yes	Distributed as an open Drupal recipe with no proprietary runtime dependency.

Migration readiness

Capability	Status	What proves it today
Migration destination for headless/composable and page/post stacks	Partial	A destination content model and migration map exist; turnkey importer automation is out of scope for the alpha.

Scope and honest limits

AI citation, ranking, rich results, and answer-engine placement are never guaranteed. This recipe builds the structural foundation that helps; it does not promise outcomes.
AI engines do not behave identically, so "AI visibility" is not a single switch. GEO Starter strengthens the rendered-HTML, structured-content, and cited-source path that documentation- and answer-citing engines favor. It does not, by itself, address community/forum or homepage-led citation patterns. Identify the engines your audience actually uses and measure per engine.

Provenance

This repository contains the starter package only. It does not vendor the externally hosted Drupal modules that were present in the broader research workspace. See docs/PROVENANCE.md.

Install And Release Readiness

docs/INSTALL.md
docs/LIMITATIONS.md
docs/PUBLISHING_AND_ACCEPTANCE_PLAN.md
docs/TECHNICAL_ACCEPTANCE_PLAN.md
docs/PROJECT_PAGE_DRAFT.md
docs/MARKETPLACE_SUBMISSION_PACKET.md
docs/RELEASE_CHECKLIST.md
docs/DEPENDENCIES.md
docs/CONTENT_LICENSES.md
docs/AUTHORING_MODEL.md
docs/MIGRATION_MAP.md
docs/SCHEMA_MAP.md

Validation

See docs/VALIDATION.md for the current smoke-test evidence and the helper scripts used to reproduce the sample-content and JSON:API checks.

Not In This Scaffold Yet

GEO-specific theme/design-system implementation.
Component-composed Canvas pages and shared component implementation.
Specialized Paragraph bundles beyond the alpha geo_starter_section proof type.
Views/editor dashboards for content operations.
Turnkey source-CMS import automation.
Rendered JSON-LD/schema templates.
Final representative Marketplace/listing screenshot.
Required AI provider, agent, or credential setup.
Marketplace submission metadata, final support commitments, or preview URL.

Those remain gated by the content-model critic, schema-map, access/security checks, and Marketplace readiness plan.

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