AI and answer-engine readiness
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews increasingly answer questions directly rather than sending a click. Being readable to them is becoming as important as ranking.
How it differs from classic SEO
Search crawlers render JavaScript. Most AI assistants fetching a page don't. If your content only appears after scripts run, an assistant frequently sees an empty shell.
Assistants also favour explicit, machine-readable facts. Structured data and clear headings do more work here than keyword placement ever did.
What to check
Whether the content is present in the raw HTML. View source, and if the text isn't there, an assistant probably can't read it.
Whether the page uses semantic landmarks such as main, header and nav, which separate the content from the navigation.
Which AI crawlers you allow. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and others can be permitted or blocked in robots.txt. This is a commercial decision rather than a technical fault: blocking them protects your content from training use, but also removes you from answers those tools generate.
Writing pages an assistant can quote
Assistants answer questions by finding a passage that answers them and summarising it, so pages that state facts plainly are easier to use. 'We service Ballarat, Sebastopol and Wendouree, Monday to Saturday, from 7am' can be quoted directly. 'We pride ourselves on serving the wider community' can't. Put the key facts near the top of the page rather than at the end of a long introduction.
Questions as headings help too. A heading such as 'How much does a blocked drain cost?' followed by a direct answer in the first sentence matches the way people phrase questions to an assistant. Keep the facts consistent across the website, the Google Business Profile and directory listings, because assistants draw on all of them and conflicting details make a business harder to recommend.
Knowing whether it's working
Visibility in AI answers is harder to measure than search rankings, but there are useful signals. Some assistants pass on visitors with a recognisable referrer or tag. ChatGPT, for example, often adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to links it cites, so these visits can be picked out in analytics. Server logs show which AI crawlers fetch the site and how often.
The most direct test is to ask. Put the questions a customer would ask to two or three assistants, such as the best electrician in a suburb or who repairs a particular appliance nearby, and note whether the business appears and what is said about it. Repeat it every few months. If the answers are wrong, the fix is usually on the business's own pages and listings, where the assistant read them.
Consistency beyond the website
Assistants don't rely on a business's website alone. They also draw on its Google Business Profile, directory listings, review sites and social profiles, and they compare what each one says. When the opening hours differ between the website and the business profile, or an old address lingers in a directory, an assistant has to guess which is right, and it may simply leave the business out.
Make one place the master record for the basics, usually the website, and update every listing from it whenever something changes. Reviews matter here too, because assistants often summarise what customers say. Replying to reviews, and asking happy customers to mention the specific service they had, gives assistants accurate material to work with.
None of this replaces the basics covered elsewhere in these guides. A page that loads quickly, states its facts in plain text, carries accurate structured data and is easy for any crawler to read is well placed for search engines and assistants alike. The work overlaps far more than it differs, and every improvement made for one audience tends to help the other.
How to fix it
- Serve your main content in the initial HTML response rather than rendering it client side.
- Wrap the primary content in a main element, and use header, nav and footer around it.
- Add structured data describing the business, and FAQPage markup for genuine questions.
- Decide deliberately which AI crawlers to allow, and record that decision in robots.txt rather than leaving it to chance.
- Consider publishing an llms.txt file summarising the site. The convention is still emerging, and it costs very little to provide.
- Ask two or three assistants the questions your customers ask, every few months, and note what they say about the business.
What good looks like
# Allow AI assistants to read the site
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /
# Or decline training use while staying in search
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /Common mistakes
- Building the entire site as a client-rendered application with no server-rendered content.
- Blocking every AI crawler by reflex, without considering the referral traffic being given up.
- Assuming an existing search ranking guarantees an assistant can read the page.
- Leaving old opening hours or an old address in directory listings, which assistants read and repeat.
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