Your next customer may never see a list of blue links. They'll ask ChatGPT which agency to hire, which software to buy, or which organization deserves their money. The answer will either name you or it won't.
This practice has collected a pile of names: AEO (answer engine optimization), GEO (generative engine optimization), LLM SEO. They all mean the same thing. AI systems need to find your content, read it, and cite it.
The traffic is still small, but it behaves differently. AI referrals are about 1% of web traffic, growing roughly a point a month. Semrush found AI visitors convert about 4.4x better than organic search visitors, and Ahrefs saw AI search drive 12% of signups from 0.5% of visits. Someone who arrives from an AI answer already knows who you are.
Meanwhile, the old channel is shrinking. AI Overviews now appear on roughly a quarter of Google searches and cut clicks to the top result by a third or more.
Here's what works, and what you can skip.
How AI search actually reads the web
Four facts explain most of the playbook:
- AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. Vercel analyzed the major AI crawlers and found that none of them execute JavaScript. Not GPTBot, not ClaudeBot, not PerplexityBot. If your content only appears after scripts run, it doesn't exist to them.
- ChatGPT search leans on Bing. Seer Interactive found 87% of ChatGPT search citations match Bing's top organic results.
- AI answers are built from passages, not pages. Google's AI Mode splits one question into many sub-queries and retrieves the best individual passages. Each section of your page competes on its own.
- Citations follow consensus. Ahrefs found branded web mentions correlate with AI visibility three times more strongly than backlinks. Models recommend what many sources agree on.
1. Make sure you're not blocking the bots
Each AI company runs separate crawlers for training, search indexing, and live user requests. OpenAI has GPTBot for training, OAI-SearchBot for search, and ChatGPT-User for live fetches. Anthropic mirrors this with ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, and Claude-User. You can block training while staying visible in search:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
The catch: robots.txt isn't the only gate. Since July 2025, Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers by default on new domains, and many firewalls and bot-protection tools do the same. Plenty of sites are invisible to AI and nobody decided that on purpose. Check your CDN and security settings, not just your robots.txt. We checked ours while writing this. loopdash.com allows every crawler.
2. Put your content in the HTML
AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript, so anything rendered client-side is invisible to them. That includes single-page apps and content loaded after the page renders.
The test takes ten seconds. View your page's source, the raw source, not the inspector, and search for a sentence from the page. If it's not there, AI can't read it. Server-side rendering or static generation fixes this. Most WordPress sites pass by default. Many modern JavaScript builds don't.
3. Show up in Bing
If ChatGPT's citations track Bing's index, you need to be in it. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap, and fix whatever it flags. It's an afternoon of work most organizations have never done.
4. Write passages an AI wants to lift
The original GEO research from Princeton tested nine tactics across 10,000 queries. Three won consistently: citing sources, adding statistics, and including quotations. Each boosted visibility in AI answers by 30 to 40%. Keyword stuffing performed worse than doing nothing.
In practice:
- Answer first. Put the direct answer in the first sentence under a descriptive heading, then elaborate.
- Make each section self-contained. Retrieval grabs chunks, not pages. A section that only makes sense in context won't get cited.
- Use real numbers and name your sources. Claims with evidence attached are the ones models repeat.
- Keep it current. Ahrefs found ChatGPT-cited pages had been updated within 30 days 76% of the time. Refreshing your best pages beats writing new ones.
One more finding if you're a small business or organization: in the Princeton study, adding citations lifted visibility for sites ranked fifth by 115%, while the top-ranked site lost ground. Generative engines flatten Google's winner-take-all dynamic.
5. Be mentioned where the models read
Models cite what the web agrees on. ChatGPT's most-cited domain is Wikipedia. Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews lean heavily on Reddit. YouTube mentions correlate with AI visibility more strongly than almost anything else Ahrefs measured. And ranked lists dominate: studies of hundreds of millions of citations found listicles account for 40 to 65% of the most-cited URLs.
The work looks less like link building and more like reputation building. Get included in the "best of" roundups for your niche. Keep your Wikipedia presence accurate if you have one. Show up in the Reddit and forum threads where your community actually talks. Publish the comparison content in your space before someone else defines it.
Semrush's study of 50,000 brands found AI visibility is won topic by topic, not by domain authority. Only 15% of categories had a clear owner. Pick the topics you can genuinely own and go deep.
How we put this to work
When we take a site through this playbook, three moves do most of the work.
Start with questions, not keywords. We use DataForSEO to pull the actual queries people ask around a topic. They're long, specific, and conversational. Then we look at which ones AI engines are answering without a good source to cite. Those gaps become the content plan.
Build calculators. A calculator answers a question with a concrete number, which is exactly what a model wants to hand a user. Statistics win citations, and a calculator makes you the source for every variation of the question. One caveat: the calculator page needs its purpose, inputs, and methodology described in plain HTML, or the crawlers can't tell what the JavaScript does.
Give the charts a markdown twin. Chart-heavy pages are a blind spot. Charts render with JavaScript, so AI crawlers see none of the data. We link each of those pages to a plain markdown file with the tables behind the charts. Crawlers get numbers they can actually quote.
What you can skip
llms.txt. The proposed standard, a markdown index of your site for AI, has real enthusiasm behind it and almost no usage. Ahrefs checked 137,000 sites and found 97% of llms.txt files received zero requests. Google's John Mueller compared it to the keywords meta tag. It's harmless and takes five minutes, but don't expect it to do anything yet.
A schema markup project. Structured data helps the search indexes that feed AI answers, especially Bing, and basic Organization and FAQ markup is worth keeping. But the evidence that schema itself drives AI citations is correlational at best. Don't buy a five-figure schema engagement on AI grounds.
A "GEO agency" retainer. After months of testing, practitioners keep landing on the same conclusion: most of this is SEO fundamentals with a new name. Clear writing, fast pages, real authority, technical hygiene. If someone's pitch depends on AI search being magic and different, be skeptical.
Get ready for agents, not just answers
The next step past AI search is AI that does things. Agents fill out forms, complete signups, and finish purchases on a user's behalf. OpenAI already runs agent-completed checkout inside ChatGPT.
What makes a site agent-friendly is what makes it accessible: semantic HTML with real buttons, labeled form fields, no forced account creation, no CAPTCHA walls in critical flows, layouts that don't shift as they load. If your checkout, signup, or donation form works for a screen reader, it'll work for an agent. Accessibility work and agent-readiness are the same work.
Final thoughts
None of this requires abandoning SEO. A second audience is now reading your site. It doesn't run JavaScript, it pulls from Bing, it cites passages instead of pages, and it rewards evidence over keywords.
The organizations that win AI citations early will be hard to displace, because models keep recommending what's already part of the consensus.
At Loopdash, we build AI-ready websites and handle the SEO fundamentals underneath all of this. If you want to know whether AI can actually see your site, ask us. The audit is quick: start a project.
