Guides to AI visibility
The questions site owners ask about AI answers and the bots behind them, answered from each vendor's own docs, published studies and our study of the sites AI answers cite.
Pick the question you have.
What is GEO, generative engine optimization?
GEO, generative engine optimization, in plain words: how AI answers pick their sources, what research shows helps, and how to measure your AI visibility.
AEO vs GEO vs SEO: what's the difference?
AEO vs GEO vs SEO: where each name came from, what Google and Microsoft say, the work all three share, and the four things that change with AI answers.
How do you check if ChatGPT mentions your brand?
Check by hand in five steps, see why one chat can't measure it (answers change, memory, location, leading questions), and where ChatGPT and Claude do help.
How to find the competitors ChatGPT recommends instead of you
A method for finding who ChatGPT recommends instead of you: which questions to ask, how many times, how to count the names and work out your share of voice.
Does ChatGPT give the same answer to everyone?
No. ChatGPT writes each answer afresh and can use your memory, location, a web search and your plan's model. OpenAI's own pages, and our repeat-run numbers.
AI visibility metrics: what to count, and how sure to be
Mention rate, first-pick rate, citation rate, share of voice and sentiment: what each one counts, how to work it out, and why each needs a range.
How to get ChatGPT to recommend your business
What gets a business named in ChatGPT's answers: what you control, whether you can submit your business, how long changes take, and how to measure it honestly.
How to get cited by ChatGPT
How ChatGPT search finds and picks the pages it links, from OpenAI's docs, what makes a page usable as a source, and which kinds of pages our data shows cited.
Why doesn't ChatGPT show your website?
Six reasons ChatGPT leaves a site out, in the order to check them: robots.txt, firewalls, noindex, JavaScript, Bing's index and who the pages it reads name.
Does ChatGPT use Google or Bing?
What OpenAI documents about where ChatGPT search gets results (Bing, its own crawler and index), what is only reported about Google, and what it means for you.
How to rank in Google's AI Overviews
What Google says you need to show up in AI Overviews, how query fan-out and nosnippet work, and what studies show: 38% of cited pages rank in the top 10.
How to rank in Google AI Mode
What sets Google's AI Mode apart from AI Overviews: query fan-out, follow-ups, a custom Gemini and Search Console's counts, and how often the two cite one page.
Perplexity SEO: how Perplexity finds, reads and cites pages
How Perplexity finds, reads and cites pages: its two crawlers, what its docs say and leave out, the Cloudflare dispute, studies, and what our runs show.
Which AI crawlers should you allow?
Which AI crawlers feed ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's answers, which only train models, and what the 1,529 of 1,605 cited sites we could read allow.
How to write robots.txt for AI crawlers
Copy-ready robots.txt rules that keep AI search crawlers in and training crawlers out, how each crawler reads the file, and the mistakes that lock AI out.
What is llms.txt, and does it do anything?
llms.txt is a Markdown file that tells AI agents what a site holds. Its format, a real example, who reads it today, and what studies show about its effect.
Is your firewall blocking AI crawlers?
Cloudflare, Vercel, AWS WAF and others can turn AI crawlers away even when robots.txt lets them in. Where each setting lives and how to let crawlers through.
Do AI crawlers render JavaScript?
Google's and Bing's crawlers render JavaScript. OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity don't say, and Vercel's 2024 study found theirs don't. Our data on cited pages.
What the sites AI cites do.
Each guide draws on our study of the 1,605 sites that ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI cited in answers we recorded.
of cited sites block GPTBot, OpenAI's training crawler; 0.9% block OAI-SearchBot, which ChatGPT search reads through.
of their robots.txt files name an AI crawler, most of them to let it in.
sites refused our crawler's request for robots.txt, the one file written for crawlers.
of the cited pages we measured show at least 99.5% of their main text in the HTML, readable without JavaScript.
- What we read: The 1,605 sites cited in 1,033 answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, for 54 questions about AI visibility tools and web analytics, recorded on October 6 and 7, 2026.
- How: Each site's robots.txt, read as GEOFastBot with the X-ray's own rules on October 8, 2026. Shares are of the 1,529 of 1,605 sites whose robots.txt we could read, or that have none; 62 refused our request. We also rendered up to 3 cited pages from 1,505 of the sites in Chrome; 2,022 pages rendered cleanly.
- Limits: AI answers already cite these sites, so sites that shut AI search crawlers out may be rarer here than on the web at large. A site can also serve other crawlers other rules than it served us.
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