Guides
Question-shaped explainers — each page answers one question the way people actually ask it, with a liftable answer up top.
AEO vs GEO vs LLMO vs AIO: Five Names, One PracticeAEO vs GEO vs LLMO vs AIO: 4 acronyms plus AI SEO, 1 practice. Where each term came from, who uses it, and how to pick without changing the work.AI Crawlers: The Complete List of Documented BotsAll 12 documented AI crawler tokens from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google, and Microsoft — what each does, robots.txt behavior, and how to verify them.Are AI Citations Worth Anything?Pew found ~1% of users click AI-cited sources. Seer found cited sites earned ~35% higher CTR. Both are true — here is what a citation is actually worth.Can Search Console Show AI Overview Impressions?No — Search Console has no AI Overviews filter as of August 2026. Google folds AIO data into the Web search type. The approximation method we use instead.ClaudeBot, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot: What Anthropic's Crawlers DoAnthropic documents 3 agents: ClaudeBot gathers training data, Claude-User fetches when users ask, Claude-SearchBot improves search. All 3 obey robots.txt.Does Schema Markup Help AI Citations? What the Evidence ShowsAhrefs' 1,885-page test found no causal citation lift from adding schema, and Google documents no special markup. Where structured data still earns its keep.GEO vs SEO: What Genuinely Differs and What Doesn'tGoogle says AI search runs on the same core systems. The 7 things that genuinely differ between GEO and SEO — and the fundamentals that don't change.GPTBot vs OAI-SearchBot: Should You Block Either?OpenAI runs 3 main agents: GPTBot trains models, OAI-SearchBot powers ChatGPT search, ChatGPT-User fetches for users. Blocking each has a different cost.How AI Search Works: How LLMs Choose What to CiteAI answer engines pick citations in 3 stages — retrieval, chunk selection, synthesis. What each stage rewards, per the Princeton GEO paper and platform docs.How Do You Get Cited by ChatGPT?Allow OAI-SearchBot, keep answers in raw HTML, build a 40–75-word liftable passage. And a ceiling to respect: ~24% of ChatGPT answers fetch no page at all.How Do You Get Recommended by Perplexity?Allow PerplexityBot, then play the measured lever: content under 3 months old was ~3x more likely to be cited. Expect 186 crawls per click (Cloudflare, 2025).How Do You Show Up in Google AI Overviews?No special markup exists — Google requires indexed, snippet-eligible pages. The 5-part checklist we run, and the 1 AIO citation our fleet has earned.How Long Should a Direct Answer Be for AI Citation?AI answer engines most often lift passages of 40–75 words for snippets and 134–167 words for citations. How we size answer blocks in production.PlaceholderHow Many People Actually Use AI Search? The Measured DataPew: 18% of Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI summary. Every AI search usage figure on this page traces to a primary study — nothing laundered.How to Fix What AI Assistants Say About Your BrandThe 6-step workflow for correcting wrong AI answers about your brand: document, trace the source, fix it, retest — and why 24% of answers resist edits.How to Measure AI Share of Voice Without Paid ToolsA fixed battery of 20–30 prompts, run monthly across 4–5 answer engines, scored in a spreadsheet. A free method that costs an afternoon a month.How to Set Up IndexNow: The 20-Minute GuideIndexNow setup in 3 steps: an 8–128 character key file at your site root, then GET or POST submissions to api.indexnow.org — up to 10,000 URLs per request.How to Track ChatGPT and AI Referral Traffic in GA4GA4 files ChatGPT and Perplexity visits under generic Referral. The 6-hostname regex and custom channel group we run in production, step by step.Is AI SEO a Scam? An Operator's AnswerThe practice is real — a 2024 Princeton study measured ~40% visibility lifts in benchmarks. Much of the industry selling it is not. 5 checks separate the two.Is SEO Dead? What the 2025–2026 Click Data Actually SaysNo — but clicks fell hard: −34.5% CTR under AI Overviews (Ahrefs, March 2025), 8% vs 15% in Pew's panel. What changed, what rebounded, what we reallocated.llms.txt: What It Is and How to Set It UpHow to write and deploy an llms.txt file in about 30 minutes: the proposal's format, a working example, and what our 3 sites' logs say about its value.Robots.txt for AI Crawlers: A Decision FrameworkDecide robots.txt by the bot's job — training, search, or user-fetch — not the company. A per-bot decision table for 4 business models, per RFC 9309.Should Publishers Block AI Crawlers? A Decision FrameworkCloudflare's July 2025 data: Google crawled 5.4 pages per referred visit, OpenAI ~1,091, Anthropic ~38,000. The block-or-allow decision, by business model.What Is a Google AI Overview? Anatomy and EligibilityA Google AI Overview is an AI-generated summary with source links shown above results. Eligibility per Google's docs, plus the 4 snippet controls you have.What Is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?Answer engine optimization (AEO) explained: what answer engines are, how AEO relates to GEO and SEO, and why 1 discipline sits under all the names.What Is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?Generative engine optimization (GEO) defined in 50 extractable words, where the term came from, and an honest table of what GEO can and cannot prove.What Is Google AI Mode — and How Is It Different From AI Overviews?AI Mode is Google's conversational search experience; AI Overviews sit above classic results. Both share 1 eligibility rule: indexed and snippet-eligible.