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  • #CaseStudy
  • #Nonprofit
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  • #GEO

Atlas of Today's World: an encyclopedia that Google and AI can find

For the Prague-based nonprofit Atlas of Today's World, we designed and built a website that turns an open encyclopedia of the present-day world into an interactive 3D atlas and, above all, into a source that search engines index well and AI assistants can cite precisely.

Develogi · Case study ·

Atlas of Today's World home page: a satellite 3D globe with color-coded regions, country labels showing the number of entries, and a panel with search and the latest entries
Atlas of Today's World on a phone: a full-screen globe with search at the top
The live atlasoftodaysworld.org website on desktop and mobile. Screenshots taken October 27, 2026.
Client
Atlas of Today's World, z. s., Prague
What we did
Website design and development, content management system, SEO and GEO
Tech stack
Next.js, Supabase, Vercel, MapTiler, Stripe

The briefWhat did Atlas need?

A website that turns an encyclopedia into an experience, and the experience into a reliable source. Atlas of Today's World is a nonprofit, open encyclopedia of the present-day world. It is published by an association founded in 2016, and everything is free to read without an account. The content combines texts by experts with data from international institutions such as UNDP, the World Bank, V-Dem and Transparency International.

Atlas wants people to read it and cite it. Today, that means two audiences: readers coming from search engines, and AI assistants that look for answers on their behalf. So the website had to make sense to both.

The solutionWhat did we build?

An interactive atlas, a content management system and donor support in one website. Visitors spin the satellite globe, click a country or region and read its profile. Meanwhile, the editors write entries in the admin panel and track how many are still missing in each region.

  • A 3D globe with data layers

    A satellite globe with switchable layers, such as the Human Development Index, political regime or perceived corruption. Every value states its source and year.

  • Profiles of 228 countries and 10 regions

    A description, timeline, entry plan, maps and charts, further reading and an FAQ. Each region shows how many entries have been published so far, for example 7 out of 10.

  • A custom CMS

    An admin panel with user roles, author invitations and management of entries, authors and country portraits. Data and authentication run on Supabase.

  • Support without tracking

    Atlas Patrons membership with payments through Stripe, a newsletter and bot protection for forms. The website uses only essential cookies and counts visits without them.

Region profile of Eastern Europe and Central Asia: the globe on the left, and on the right the region's description, number of countries and population, and a timeline of events
A region profile: the globe stays next to the text, so readers don’t lose context.

SEOHow does Google find it?

Every page is generated in advance, described with structured data and listed in a sitemap. Search engines don’t have to guess anything. The website is built with Next.js and hosted on Vercel, so readers and crawlers alike get fully rendered pages without waiting for JavaScript.

297

URLs in 6 topical sitemaps: pages, regions, countries, data, entries and authors.

100

points for SEO, accessibility and best practices in Lighthouse, on both mobile and desktop.1

15

structured data types on the home page, ranging from the nonprofit itself to its datasets.

  • An organization with an identity: NGO structured data with the registration number, address, founding date and a link to its Wikidata entry. This lets search engines and AI tie Atlas to a specific organization.
  • Entries as articles: every entry marks up its author as a Person, along with publication and last-updated dates and breadcrumbs.
  • Data as datasets: indicators are described as Dataset and DataCatalog, so dataset search can find them too.
  • On-site search: WebSite with SearchAction shows Google how to search Atlas.

GEOHow does AI cite it?

Atlas locks nothing away from AI assistants and serves its content in a form they can cite precisely. GEO, or generative engine optimization, is mostly about content. Research presented at KDD 2024 found that citing sources and adding statistics increase a page’s visibility in AI answers by roughly 28% to 33%.2 Atlas is built exactly that way: every value has a source and a year.

  • AI search engines explicitly allowed. The robots.txt file names and allows the crawlers of ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Mistral and other AI search engines.
  • llms.txt with citation instructions. An overview of the content for language models, including a “Cite as” line with the exact citation format.
  • All content in one file. llms-full.txt holds the full text of every entry, 788 KB in total.
  • Markdown for every article. Add .md to the URL and AI gets clean text without navigation or scripts.
  • RSS and Atom. New content reaches aggregators and crawlers automatically.
  • Author and dates on everything. Every article shows its author, publication date and last update, which AI and Google treat as signs of trustworthiness.

Lighthouse, Atlas home page

Points out of 100, measured on October 27, 2026. Dark bars: desktop. Light bars: mobile.

  1. SEO100100
  2. Accessibility100100
  3. Best practices100100
  4. Performance6855

For your websiteWhat your website can borrow from Atlas

We build the same foundation into every website. You don’t need a globe to be found by Google and cited by AI.

  • 1

    Pre-rendered pages

    Static generation, fast loading and content that crawlers can read without JavaScript.

  • 2

    Accurate structured data

    Organizations, articles, authors, products or datasets. Always consistent with what is visible on the page.

  • 3

    An open door for AI

    A robots.txt that allows AI search engines, llms.txt and Markdown versions of the content.

  • 4

    Citable content

    The answer up front, numbers with sources, the author and the date of the last update.

Let's get in touch - contact More of our projects

QuestionsFAQ

What is GEO?

It stands for generative engine optimization. The goal is for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity to find your page, understand it and cite it as a source. It depends mainly on high-quality, well-sourced content and on AI crawlers being able to access the website.

Does my website need llms.txt?

It isn’t required. Google says its AI search features don’t require any special files or extra structured data. But llms.txt is cheap to add and can help AI agents that browse the web on a user’s behalf. On Atlas, the file also spells out exactly how to cite the site.3

How do I know if AI cites my website?

In your analytics, watch for visits from domains such as chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai, and every now and then ask AI assistants questions about your field.

Do you build websites for nonprofits?

Yes. We devote part of our work to nonprofit projects and companies with a social mission, at discounted rates.

Sources and measurements

  1. Lighthouse 12.6, home page of atlasoftodaysworld.org, October 27, 2026. Desktop: performance 68, accessibility 100, best practices 100, SEO 100. Mobile: 55, 100, 100, 100. Measurement
  2. Aggarwal et al. (2024): GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024 Research
  3. Google Search Central: AI features and your website Official documentation
  4. atlasoftodaysworld.org/llms.txt, robots.txt and sitemap.xml Client website

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