Part ofAI visibility and search
GEO and llms.txt
GEO, generative engine optimization, is the work of getting cited in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot. It differs from classic SEO in that the goal is not a position but a sentence inside somebody else’s answer, which rewards content that is self-contained, factual and liftable out of the page without losing meaning.
Write passages that stand alone
A model rarely cites a whole page, it cites a passage. A paragraph starting with "this" and pointing backwards becomes unintelligible once extracted. Opening by restating the subject and giving the answer immediately is the single most effective change in this work, and it costs nothing to make.
llms.txt and crawler access
llms.txt is a proposed standard where a plain text file describes what the site contains and links to the most important pages. It is not established the way robots.txt is, but it is cheap to add and makes the content easier to summarise. More important is that robots.txt actually admits the crawlers you want citations from, which many default setups block.
Measuring without a referrer
Traffic from AI answers often arrives without a referrer and therefore does not show up as a channel in analytics. What can be measured is crawler visits in the server log, and what the models actually say when asked about your category. The second is checked by asking the same questions at intervals and keeping the answers.
Common questions about this service
Does llms.txt work at all?
It is a proposal rather than an established standard, and support varies between vendors. It is also a text file that takes half an hour to generate from data you already have, so the trade-off is easy. The larger effect comes from content being present in the HTML and written in self-contained passages, not from the file itself.
Should we block AI crawlers instead?
It depends on what you sell. A publisher whose business is its content has a real reason to block. A services company that wants to be recommended does not, because a blocked site cannot be cited. For most B2B companies, AI answers are a channel rather than a leak.
More in the same area
Technical SEO
Making pages fetchable, readable and indexable before any other SEO work means anything.
Structured data and schema
Schema.org in JSON-LD so machines understand what the page is about.
GEO and llms.txt
Writing and structuring content so language models cite you as the source.
