Insights on AEO strategy, AI-powered search, and how brands stay visible when answers replace links.
Googlebot is Google Search’s documented crawler, while Google-Extended is a robots.txt control for specified AI training and grounding uses of crawled content, including documented Gemini-related applications.
AI crawlers are automated clients whose roles vary across training, search indexing, user-triggered retrieval, and product control; user-agent strings, robots.txt, logs, and IP checks provide useful but limited evidence.
An AI discoverability self-audit tests technical retrievability, answer appearance, citation, and accurate representation separately using fixed prompts, documented evidence, entity checks, and cautious retesting.
AI discoverability is the layered process by which systems acquire information, interpret entities, retrieve relevant material, select sources, and present claims in generated answers; technical accessibility supports eligibility but never guarantees citation, recommendation, traffic, or influence.
Most robots.txt guides for AI crawlers are written for publishers who want to block the bots. This is the opposite: how to check if your site is accidentally invisible to ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity — and the exact lines to paste to fix it.
The case for local AEO used to rest on extrapolation. After 858,457 sites and 68.9M crawler visits, the data has caught up. Here is the synthesis.
Answer engine optimization explained simply, with practical steps to improve AI search visibility and earn more citations in answers.