AI search optimisation:
getting cited, not just ranked

Where the money leaks today

A site can rank well in traditional Google results and still be invisible in an AI Overview or a ChatGPT answer, usually for one of two reasons: the site’s robots.txt or firewall is quietly blocking the crawlers these systems use, or the content is written in a way that is hard for a model to extract cleanly, long paragraphs with the actual answer buried in the middle rather than stated directly. Nobody notices this gap because there is no dashboard yet that most teams check for AI citation the way they check Search Console for rankings.

A specific and easy-to-miss cause: a security or bot-mitigation rule added for an unrelated reason (blocking scraper abuse) ends up silently blocking the exact crawlers these answer engines use to read your site, which means no amount of content restructuring will help until that access is actually restored.

What we do

We first check the boring but critical thing: can known AI crawlers actually reach your site, or is a security rule silently blocking them. Then we restructure priority content into clear, directly quotable statements, lists and FAQ blocks, the format these systems extract most reliably, without turning the page into a bulleted mess for human readers. We set a citation baseline by checking what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overview currently say when asked about your category, then track it monthly.

We also track what a competitor gets cited for instead of you on the same question, since that gap is often the clearest signal of what your own content is missing structurally, more useful than a generic best-practices checklist applied without reference to what is actually winning the citation right now.

What we need from you

A list of the pages or topics you most want cited for, and ideally server log access so we can check for known AI crawler user agents being blocked, which we find more often than you would expect. If your team has noticed specific questions where a model gives an outdated or simply wrong answer about your product, send those over directly, since they are often the fastest and most concrete starting point for this work. Server log access, even a short recent sample, is genuinely useful here and often overlooked.

How we measure

Citation appearance across the answer engines we track for your category’s key questions, crawler access logs for known AI bots, and, where attributable, referral traffic from AI answer engines that include a link. We log the exact question asked and the exact answer returned at each check, not just a yes/no citation count, since the wording of the answer itself often reveals exactly what content gap or access problem needs fixing next, kept as a running record so a shift in how a model answers over time is visible rather than anecdotal.

Price and timeline

Related

This service is deliberately scoped narrowly around access and structure rather than promising to game an opaque, fast-changing system, which is also why it pairs naturally with ordinary on-page and content work: the same clarity that earns a citation from a model is, in almost every case, also what earns a better ranking and a better reader experience in traditional search. Correct schema markup is a frequent prerequisite too, since structured data is one of the clearest signals a model can extract from reliably. This sits naturally beside SaaS SEO and content hubs and topic clusters, since clear, well-structured content serves both channels at once. Full service: SEO and content. For the AI agent side of our work, see the AI agents service. This structure is the same one behind our 973-page SEO site. Get in touch and we will check right now whether AI crawlers can even reach your site.