Short answer: fix things in the order an AI system meets your site. First it has to be allowed in, then it has to be able to read the page, then it has to understand who you are, and only then does it matter how good the writing is. Most small sites lose at step one and never find out, because every later fix is wasted until the door is open.
1. Can the bots get in at all?
Check your firewall before your robots.txt. A robots.txt file can welcome every AI search bot while a firewall rule quietly sends them a 403 or a challenge page. If you use Cloudflare, start with our guide to Cloudflare blocking ChatGPT. Then confirm which crawlers you actually want in, using the list of AI crawler user agents. This is the cheapest fix and the one with the biggest downside if you skip it.
2. Can they read the page without running scripts?
Many AI crawlers fetch the HTML and stop. If your main text, prices or contact details only appear after JavaScript runs, those crawlers see an empty shell. Open the page with scripts turned off, or fetch it with curl, and check that the answer to your customer's question is in the raw text. The quick way to test this is in Can ChatGPT read my website?
3. Does the page say who you are?
This is the entity step. Name, address, what you do, who runs the business, and links to your real profiles, written in plain text and backed by schema. If an AI system cannot tell that your business and your LinkedIn page are the same thing, it will hedge or skip you. Our guide to sameAs schema for small businesses covers the exact markup.
4. Is the answer in the first two lines?
Only now does the writing matter. Put the direct answer at the top, then the detail. We learned this from our own numbers: over 28 days (7 Oct to 3 Nov 2026) our site had 3,424 impressions but only 25 clicks. The broad pillar guide ranked for big head terms and got no clicks, while narrow pages that answered one exact question got the few clicks we did earn. Broad pages get seen, narrow pages get chosen.
5. Are other places saying you exist?
AI answers lean on sources outside your own site: directories, articles, forum threads, a Medium or LinkedIn write-up. After the four steps above, one honest mention on a site that already ranks does more than another page on your own domain.
6. Measure, then repeat
Pick one step, change one thing, and check again in two to four weeks. How to track the results is in how to measure AI search optimization. If you want the whole picture in one place, the complete guide walks through all of it.
A simple rule for deciding
If you only have an hour this week, spend it on step one or two. If those already pass, move down the list. Never start at step five because it feels more exciting.
Related
View all →AI crawler user agents: what to allow, from GPTBot to ClaudeBot
Every AI crawler name you will see in your logs, what each one is for, which to allow if you want to be found in AI answers, copy-paste robots.txt rules, and the test we ran on our own site.
Cloudflare blocking ChatGPT? Fix the 403 challenge page
ChatGPT hitting a Cloudflare challenge page or 403 on your site? The bot-fight and WAF settings that cause it, how to confirm it, and the fix.
Can ChatGPT read my website? Check it in 60 seconds
Four quick tests show whether ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity can fetch and read your site: robots.txt, a crawler fetch, the raw HTML and your server logs. Free, no sign-up.
Find out whether AI answers can read your site.
Crawl Audit scores your own domain against the signals in this guide. The free check needs no sign-up; the full report is $7.89, one time.