AI readiness: getting your site cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI
Search is splitting in two. Alongside the familiar list of blue links, millions of people now get answers straight from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI overviews. Being recommended by those tools is becoming as important as ranking on Google, and it depends on a handful of things you can actually control.
People sometimes call this GEO, for generative engine optimisation, or simply AI SEO. Strip away the jargon and it comes down to one plain question: when an AI assistant answers a question your business could answer, can it reach your site, understand it, and quote you correctly? This guide walks through what actually decides that, and the concrete steps to improve it.
How AI tools decide which sites to quote
AI answers are not magic. Behind the scenes, these tools rely on crawlers that fetch web pages, and on being able to read and trust what they find. There are three gates your site has to pass:
- Reach.The AI’s crawler has to be allowed to fetch your pages. Many sites, often without realising, block them.
- Read. The content has to be present in the plain HTML, because most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript. If your text only appears after scripts load, they see very little.
- Understand. Clear structure and machine-readable data help the AI work out who you are, what you offer and where, so it quotes you accurately instead of guessing or skipping you.
The AI crawlers you need to know about
Each major AI company publishes a named crawler that obeys your robots.txt file. If you block one, you opt out of that tool. These are the ones that matter today:
- GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot — OpenAI, powering ChatGPT and ChatGPT Search.
- ClaudeBot — Anthropic, powering Claude.
- PerplexityBot — Perplexity, an AI answer engine that cites its sources prominently.
- Google-Extended— Google’s control for Gemini and AI features.
- CCBot — Common Crawl, an open dataset that feeds the training of many models.
A common trap: some hosting providers and security tools now add an “AI bot blocking” setting that quietly inserts Disallow: / rules for these crawlers into your robots.txt. Your site looks fine, but ChatGPT and Claude can no longer read it. This is worth checking, because it is easy to switch on by accident. A free Quence audit tells you, bot by bot, exactly which are allowed and which are blocked.
The steps to become AI-visible
1. Let the AI crawlers in (unless you deliberately want out)
Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and check for any Disallow: / lines under the crawler names above. If you want to appear in AI answers, remove those blocks. If you have a genuine reason to opt out of AI training, keeping them is a legitimate choice, but know that it also stops AI assistants recommending you.
2. Put your real content in the HTML
If your site is built as a single-page app that renders everything with JavaScript, an AI crawler may fetch a near-empty shell. Server-side rendering or static generation puts your actual words in the first response, so both AI and Google see them. If your homepage has almost no text before scripts run, this is a priority.
3. Add structured data
Structured data (schema.org, usually written as JSON-LD) is a small block of code that states the facts about your business plainly: your name, what you do, your location, your opening hours, your prices. It removes ambiguity, which is exactly what an AI needs to quote you with confidence. For a local business, an Organization or LocalBusiness block is the place to start.
4. Write clear, factual, answer-shaped content
AI tools favour content that answers a question directly. Short, factual sentences, clear headings, and genuine detail about your services and area beat vague marketing copy. Think about the actual questions a customer would ask an assistant, and make sure your pages answer them in plain language.
5. Keep the SEO basics right too
AI readiness does not replace traditional SEO, it sits alongside it. Titles, headings, a sitemap and being indexable all still matter, because AI search and traditional search increasingly draw on the same signals. Our how it works guide covers those.
An honest note on guarantees
No tool, ours included, can promise you will show up in ChatGPT or Google’s AI answers. These systems are changing constantly and no one controls them from the outside. What you can do is remove the barriers that definitely keep you out, and give the AI everything it needs to quote you well. Do that, and you have given yourself the best possible chance as this shift accelerates.
Want to know where your site stands right now? A free Quence audit checks every point above in seconds, and shows you the evidence for each.