AI search optimisation:
getting cited, not just ranked

Why ranking well is not enough anymore

A site can rank well in traditional Google results and still be invisible in an AI Overview or a ChatGPT answer. Usually it is one of two reasons. The site’s robots.txt or firewall quietly blocks the crawlers these systems use. Or the content buries the actual answer in the middle of a long paragraph instead of stating it directly, which makes it hard for a model to extract. Nobody notices this gap, because most teams do not yet have a dashboard for AI citation the way they check Search Console for rankings.

One cause is especially easy to miss. A security or bot-mitigation rule added for an unrelated reason, like blocking scraper abuse, can silently block the exact crawlers these answer engines use. No amount of content restructuring helps until that access is restored.

What the work actually covers

We check the boring but critical thing first: can known AI crawlers actually reach your site, or is a security rule silently blocking them. Then we restructure priority content into clear, directly quotable statements, lists and FAQ blocks. This is the format these systems extract most reliably, without turning the page into a bulleted mess for human readers. We set a citation baseline by checking what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overview currently say about your category, then track it monthly.

We also track what a competitor gets cited for instead of you, on the same question. That gap is usually the clearest signal of what your own content is missing. It beats a generic best-practices checklist with no reference to what is actually winning the citation right now.

What you hand us to start

A list of the pages or topics you most want cited for. Ideally, server log access, so we can check for known AI crawler user agents being blocked, which happens more often than you would expect. If your team has noticed questions where a model gives an outdated or wrong answer about your product, send those over. They are often the fastest, most concrete starting point.

What the monthly check actually tracks

Citation appearance across the answer engines we track, for your category’s key questions. Crawler access logs for known AI bots. And, where attributable, referral traffic from AI answer engines that include a link. We log the exact question asked and the exact answer returned at each check, not just a yes or no citation count. The wording of the answer often reveals exactly what gap needs fixing next. We keep it as a running record, so a shift in how a model answers is visible over time, not anecdotal.

Price and timeline

Related

This service stays deliberately narrow, around access and structure, rather than promising to game an opaque, fast-changing system. That is also why it pairs naturally with ordinary on-page and content work. The clarity that earns a citation from a model is, almost always, the same clarity that earns a better ranking in traditional search and a better reader experience. Correct schema markup is a frequent prerequisite too, since structured data is one of the clearest signals a model can extract. This sits naturally beside SaaS SEO and content hubs and topic clusters, since clear, well-structured content serves both channels at once. Full service: SEO and content. For the AI agent side of our work, see the AI agents service. This structure is the same one behind our 973-page SEO site. Get in touch and we will check right now whether AI crawlers can even reach your site.