Make the information usable.
- Allow appropriate discovery and crawling.
- Explain products, services and authorship clearly.
- Offer original answers with useful context and sources.
- Measure what is genuinely observable.
Marketing AI search
AI search: less magic, more homework.
A practical, sceptical approach to being found in AI answers: sound SEO foundations, a few specific checks and no promises about citations.
Who this suits
Suits
- Businesses that want to know what, if anything, to do differently for AI search.
- Sites that are already reasonably sound and want specific checks on crawler access and measurement.
- Owners who have been pitched “GEO” or “AEO” packages and want a second opinion.
Not for
- Anyone looking for guaranteed citations or a guaranteed place in an AI answer.
- A standalone package that replaces ordinary SEO. It does not exist.
AI search / Reality check
Findable. Readable. Worth citing.
Most useful work still looks like sound SEO. The AI-specific checks are real, but a special file or a promised citation is not a substitute for a good website.
No citation magic.
- Guaranteed appearances in AI answers.
- Unproven “AI ranking” formulas.
- Artificial page chunks written only for bots.
- A new file as a replacement for proper SEO.
Read the evidenceSEO foundations ↗
The practical detail / AI search
A practical checklist. Not a magic formula.
Crawler access, sound SEO and evidence-led content come before claims about AI citations.
What the search engines themselves say
Google states that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that you do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup. Its guidance for generative AI emphasises original, genuinely useful content, pages that are indexed and eligible for snippets, clear page structure and a good page experience. That is ordinary SEO.
Other AI products behave differently. OpenAI publishes separate crawlers for search and for model training, and documents that each setting is independent of the others. Microsoft has begun reporting on how often your pages are cited in AI answers in Bing Webmaster Tools, as a public preview. Perplexity and Anthropic publish their own crawler details too.
What we actually do
- Check access. Are public pages reachable by the search crawlers you want, and are any blocks deliberate? Changes to a robots file can take up to a day to be picked up, according to OpenAI’s documentation.
- Make the foundations sound. Indexable pages, clear headings, a direct answer near the top of useful pages, accurate organisation details, internal links and honest authorship.
- Write pages worth citing. Original reasoning, clear definitions, sources and dates. Not paraphrases of what is already out there.
- Measure carefully. Search Console includes AI-related search clicks within overall Search performance. Google also offers a separate Generative AI performance report showing impressions in AI search features by page, date, country and device, where enough data is available. It is not a separate report of sales or clicks attributable to AI answers. Bing’s AI Performance report, announced as a public preview, provides its own citation-focused measurements. Third-party prompt trackers sample answers that vary, so their results are indicative, not a precise market share.
- Decide crawler policy with you. Which crawlers to allow is a commercial choice, and we make the consequences clear before it is made.
What we do not do
We do not promise citations, “AI rankings” or a fixed number of mentions. We do not sell AI visibility as a separate package priced apart from sound SEO, and we do not recommend tricks such as rewriting pages into artificial chunks for machines.
Working with SMB
AI search work sits inside an SEO retainer, on the same terms: a flat monthly fee and a three-month minimum to begin. See how we work.
FAQ
Questions people ask.
Do I need an llms.txt file?
Google’s own guidance says you do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup to appear in its AI features. We do not sell llms.txt as a solution.
Do I need special schema markup for AI Overviews?
No. Structured data is worth having where it accurately describes your page, but Google says there are no extra requirements for AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend us?
No one can. Whether a page is cited is decided by the AI system. What can be controlled is whether it is allowed to find and read your pages, and whether the pages are worth citing.
Should we block AI crawlers?
That is a business decision, and the crawlers do different things. Blocking a training crawler is separate from blocking a search crawler. We lay out the options and the consequences, and you decide.
Before you decide
Related reading.
The evidence and reasoning behind this page, with sources.
More from the Marketing side.
Or walk through to the Business side.
