AI & GEO
Generative engine optimization, AI visibility and AI citations: how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews pick the sources they cite.
AI-Powered Search Engines: A Complete Guide
How AI search engines work, the major players from Perplexity to ChatGPT, how each one decides what to cite, and what that means for a website's visibility.
Google AI Overviews: The Complete Guide
Understanding Google's AI-generated summaries, their impact on organic traffic, and how to optimize for citation.
AI Search Citation Sources: The Data Behind AI Recommendations
Which websites do ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI cite most? Data from 680M+ citations reveals the answers.
What AI Citability Means for an Expired Domain
Answer engines pick sources by provenance, and provenance is exactly what an aged domain either has or doesn't. What the score measures, what it can't tell you, and how to read it on a listing.
How to Get Cited by ChatGPT (What the Docs and the Studies Say)
ChatGPT cites what its search index retrieves, so getting cited is two jobs: let OAI-SearchBot in, then be a domain the index has reason to reach for. What OpenAI documents, what the citation studies measure, and the order to do the work in.
How to Tell If ChatGPT and Other AI Assistants Are Citing Your Site
There is no single dashboard for AI citations. There are five measurements, each answering a different question: a prompt panel you run by hand, Bing's AI Performance report, referral traffic, your own server logs, and the provenance of your domain. What each one can and cannot see.
Do You Need an llms.txt File? What the Evidence Says
No AI company documents reading llms.txt, Google has compared it to the keywords meta tag, and a study of 137,210 domains found 97% of published files were never fetched by anything. The proposal, the evidence against it, the one honest reason to publish one anyway, and where the effort should go instead.
Should You Block AI Crawlers? A robots.txt Guide to GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot
Blocking AI training crawlers and blocking AI search crawlers are two different decisions with two different costs, and one broad rule usually makes both by accident. What each vendor documents its agents doing, what blocking each one removes you from, and three robots.txt stances you can copy.
Do Backlinks Matter for AI Search Like ChatGPT?
Indirectly and unevenly. Links help put a page in the index assistants retrieve from, and citation follows from being referenced rather than from ranking. What the measurement studies show and what nobody outside the vendors can know.
How to Find Domains the Sources AI Cites Already Link To
Two steps: work out which sources the assistants lean on for your subject by running your own questions, then find domains those sources already reference. The source families that recur, and why subject fit decides it.
Why Isn't My Site Showing Up in Google AI Overviews?
Four causes, in the order they are usually the answer: the query does not trigger an overview, the page is not indexed, it is indexed but not retrieved, or it is retrieved and not selected. The check for each, and what Google says is not controllable.
Does Posting on Reddit Help You Get Cited by AI Assistants?
Reddit is the most-cited domain in our own measurement of two answer engines, so the pull is real. The mechanism is that the assistant cites the thread, not you. What that means for comments, for links, and for a domain an old thread already points at.
Generative Engine Optimization
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): What It Is and Where Domains Fit
GEO is the work of getting cited by answer engines rather than ranked by a results page. What the term means, how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews actually pick sources according to their own docs, a checklist for a new site, and why a domain's existing citations are the part you cannot rush.
AI Visibility for a New Website: How to Get Cited by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews
A new site has no citation history, and AI answer engines pick sources by provenance. What ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews actually cite according to their own docs and the measurement studies, why domains already referenced from Wikipedia, .edu, .gov and Reddit get picked up first, how to measure where you stand, and the limits nobody selling an AI visibility dashboard will tell you.
LLM Citations: How ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews Pick Sources (5 Studies Compared)
How each AI assistant finds and shows the sources behind an answer, what five measurement studies say about which domains get cited, why the percentages disagree, and what an aged domain's inbound links do and do not tell you about citation.