A meaningful share of buying research now happens inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews instead of classic search results. If your business isn't being found and cited by these systems, you're invisible to a growing slice of your market. The good news: the fundamentals overlap heavily with classic SEO — but there are new moves too.

The foundation hasn't changed: technical SEO

  • Fast load times and clean Core Web Vitals — AI crawlers give up on slow sites just like users do
  • Semantic HTML with a clear heading hierarchy — LLMs parse structure, not pixels
  • A complete XML sitemap and a robots.txt that allows the crawlers you want
  • Canonical URLs and per-page meta descriptions — one generic title across your whole site kills discoverability

New move #1: allow AI crawlers deliberately

GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended each have their own user agents. Blocking them means your content can never be cited in those assistants' answers. For most businesses, being cited is free distribution — allow them explicitly in robots.txt.

New move #2: publish an llms.txt file

llms.txt is an emerging convention — a markdown file at your site root that gives AI systems a curated summary of who you are, what you offer, and where your key pages live. It costs twenty minutes and puts your best-foot description directly in front of any AI system that looks. We ship one with every site we build.

New move #3: structured data everywhere

Schema.org markup (Organization, Service, FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList) is machine-readable ground truth about your business. It has always helped Google rich results; now it also feeds the knowledge extraction that decides whether an AI assistant recommends you or your competitor.

New move #4: write for extraction

  • Answer questions directly in the first sentence of a section, then elaborate
  • Use specific numbers, timelines, and prices — LLMs prefer citing concrete claims
  • One clear topic per page; ambiguous pages get skipped
  • FAQ sections map one-to-one onto the questions users ask assistants
Classic SEO asks 'will Google rank this page?' AI SEO adds 'would an assistant quote this page to answer a real question?'

How to measure it

Track referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, and AI Overview clicks in your analytics, and periodically ask the major assistants the questions your customers ask ('best X agency for Y') to see if you appear. It's early and imperfect — which is exactly why moving now is an advantage. This is a core part of our AI-Powered SEO service; the sites we optimize are built to be legible to both kinds of search.