INNOPS / PATTERNS / AI ENGINES
NOTE · 01 · GEO

What AI engines actually read on your site.

ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity answer questions your customers used to Google. Six concrete things they check before they cite you — the same six our free GEO scan scores.

GEOllms.txtStructured dataAI search
THE SHIFT
Your next customer may never see your search ranking. They see whether the AI cites you.

A growing share of buying questions get asked to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews instead of a search box. The engine reads a handful of pages, synthesizes an answer, and cites two or three sources. Either you're one of them or you don't exist for that question. GEO — generative engine optimization — is the work of being readable, trustable, and citable to these systems.

The good news: what they check is concrete and mostly cheap to fix. These are the six dimensions, in the order we'd fix them.

THE SIX CHECKS
Six things, in fixing order.
01
AI crawler access
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended have to be allowed in robots.txt. Block them and nothing else on this list matters.
02
llms.txt
A plain-text map that tells AI systems what your site is and what to read first. An hour of work, increasingly expected.
03
Structured data
JSON-LD schema: Organization, Article, FAQPage, Author. The machine-readable layer retrieval systems lean on to understand and attribute you.
04
Metadata & crawlability
Title, description, canonical, Open Graph, sitemap, indexability. The unglamorous basics that decide whether you get read at all.
05
Answer-ready content
Clear heading structure, question-style sections, FAQ blocks, direct answers near the top. The shape LLMs pull from when they summarize.
06
Authority & entity signals
Named authors, dates, citations, hard numbers. AI engines prefer data-backed, attributable claims they can stand behind.
FREE TOOL
Score your own page on these six.
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