What is AI SEO?

Why AI SEO exists

A growing share of questions never reach a results page - they’re answered directly by an AI engine that read the web and chose its sources. For those queries, visibility is binary: you’re cited or you’re absent. AI SEO is the discipline of making sure you’re citable - and most of what it fixes is mechanical, checkable and currently broken on the majority of sites.

The five pillars

• Access - AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) allowed in robots.txt. Blocked means invisible.
• Structure - clean semantic HTML with answer-first content an engine can quote verbatim.
• Schema - Organization and FAQ structured data so facts and authorship are machine-readable.
• Entities - one unambiguous identity, corroborated across the web and anchored in Wikidata.
• Guidance - an llms.txt telling models what your site is and where the good content lives.

Each pillar has a free tool: robots.txt generator for access, schema validator for structured data, AI Visibility Checker for entities, and the llms.txt generator for guidance.

It plays out differently per engine

The pillars are shared, but each engine weighs them differently: Perplexity retrieves live and cites generously (the fastest scoreboard), Google’s AI Overviews cite almost only pages that already rank, and ChatGPT leans on entity trust built over time. For the terminology layer - GEO, AEO and how they relate - see GEO vs SEO.

Where to start (in order)

• Run a free AI SEO audit to see your baseline score and blocked crawlers.
• Fix access first: one robots.txt line can be worth more than a year of content.
• Add Organization + FAQ schema and rewrite your key pages answer-first.
• Publish an llms.txt (60 seconds with the generator).
• Start the entity work - it compounds slowest, so start it earliest.
• Monitor: a redeploy can silently undo any of the above.

AI SEO: FAQ

What is AI SEO?

AI SEO is optimising a website to be found, understood and cited by AI engines - ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude - as well as ranking in classic search. It keeps the foundations of technical SEO and adds new signals: AI crawler permissions, answer-first content, entity clarity, structured data and llms.txt.

Is AI SEO different from normal SEO?

It's an extension, not a replacement. Roughly 70% overlaps - crawlability, structure, schema and authority help both. The new 30% is what classic audits never checked: whether AI crawlers are allowed in, whether your content contains a quotable answer, whether AI can resolve who you are as an entity, and whether you've published an llms.txt.

How do I start with AI SEO?

In order: run an AI SEO audit to see where you stand; unblock AI crawlers in robots.txt; add Organization and FAQ schema; rewrite key pages answer-first; publish an llms.txt; then build entity presence over time. Access first - nothing else matters while crawlers are blocked.

Do AI SEO tools exist?

Yes - a growing category. The useful free ones scan your site the way an AI engine reads it: crawler access per engine, structured data, entity presence, llms.txt and answer-first structure, returning a scored action list. That beats guessing, because most AI visibility failures are mechanical and invisible in a normal SEO audit.

Is AI SEO the same as GEO or AEO?

AI SEO is the umbrella term. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the part about being cited by generative engines; AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is the part about structuring content so a direct answer can be extracted. In practice they share most of the same work.