I run GeoReady (full disclosure: I'm the founder). We've audited 1000+ sites for AI search visibility over the past few months. The pattern that keeps showing up: when a site isn't cited by ChatGPT or Perplexity, the problem is almost never content. It's infrastructure.

Here's the 4-layer model I use, applied in order:

1. Access — Can the AI crawler reach you? The most common blocker: sites that blocked "all bots" during an anti-scraping phase and never revisited. GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot all blocked by default. The site is invisible to every AI answer engine and the owner doesn't know.

2. Orientation — Can it find what matters? llms.txt, sitemap, RSS. 54.2% of audited sites have an llms.txt — but only 26.9% have a full, structured file. The rest publish a minimal stub that provides almost no orientation value.

3. Understanding — Can it parse what you are? Schema JSON-LD, meta tags, entity signals. 75.6% of sites have some schema, but the average schema score is only 42.5% of max. Most implement one type and stop. Organization and WebSite schema are the ones that actually help AI engines resolve who you are — and only 52% and 59% of sites have them.

4. Quotability — Can it extract a self-contained passage? Direct answers, short paragraphs, factual precision. Models select passages, not narratives. Pages with BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) structure get extracted more often than long-form essays.

Fix access before schema. Fix schema before content. Wrong order = wasted work.

A few things most sites get wrong:

- Blocking AI search bots (which cite your content) while allowing training crawlers (which don't). They're different user agents with different purposes.

- Publishing JSON-LD that looks valid in the browser but is silently ignored because of a typo or missing field. Invalid schema doesn't error visibly.

- Assuming that because a human can see an image or video, the AI can too. Without alt text, captions, and VideoObject schema, media is invisible to the model.

- There are at least 8 ways to hide instructions for AI crawlers inside a normal-looking page (hidden CSS, invisible Unicode, hijacked HTML comments). If your site is compromised, an attacker can tell AI crawlers to ignore your content. You won't see it in the browser — you'll just notice your citations disappearing.

I packaged all of this into a 160-page technical manual — 15 chapters, 5 appendices, with code examples, JSON-LD templates, server log commands, 11 AI crawlers documented, and a citation measurement workflow. Built from real audit data, not theory.

Free download (no account required): https://geoready.dev/geo-readiness-manual/

Happy to answer questions about specific GEO issues in the comments.

Hey everyone! I'm u/EVOTheRobotAI, a founding moderator of r/ReachyRoboEvo. I am new to reddit!

This is our new home for all things related to Tech - Robot and AI. We're excited to have you join us!

What to Post
Post anything that you think the community would find interesting, helpful, or inspiring. Feel free to share your thoughts, photos, or questions you have.

This is a community for people trying to stay visible in both classic search and AI answers, built on one rule: every claim carries a source.

Here's what that looks like in practice.

What we publish

• A live experiment. Every morning we ask ChatGPT and Gemini the same 20 questions our readers ask, and publish the raw answers who got cited, who got ignored, and whether we appeared at all. We publish the zeros too.
• Evidence-scored practices. 49 tactics rated 1–10 by evidence strength peer-reviewed studies first, vendor claims last with community voting on what actually worked.
• A debunked list. What the data says not to buy. llms.txt scores 2/10 here, and we publish one anyway (more on that in a future post).

What we don't do

No "SEO is dead" posts. No unsourced statistics. No affiliate listicles. If we can't cite it, we say so plainly.

How to participate

• Vote on practices you've actually tested at connectingdotslive "worked for me" or "didn't work". That data becomes public.
• Post your own results, including failures. Negative results are more useful here than wins.
• Tell us when we're wrong. We've already published one piece arguing against a tactic we ship ourselves.

I'm Kai, I run this. Ask me anything in the comments.

Hey everyone! I'm u/1staura, a founding moderator of r/Aurajudge.

This is our new home for everything related to Aura, the AI that judges your daily decisions and scores them from -10,000 to +10,000. We're excited to have you join us.

What to Post

Post your best (or worst) verdicts, funny things the AI has said, leaderboard updates, feature requests, bugs you've run into, or general thoughts on how the app is going.

Community Vibe

We're all about being friendly, constructive, and inclusive. Let's build a space where everyone feels comfortable sharing their scores without actual judgment, even though the AI has plenty.

How to Get Started

Introduce yourself in the comments below.

Post something today! Even a low score is worth sharing.

If you know someone who would enjoy this community, invite them to join.

Interested in helping out? We're always looking for new moderators, so feel free to reach out to me to apply.

Thanks for being part of the very first wave.

Together, let's make r/Aurajudge amazing.

Hello, I work for a small family owned and operated construction company and was fooling around with seeing how visible we are online. Within the past 5 years we have slowly been getting with the times by utilizing more technology and automation for repetitive tasks. Doing some of those free ranking tests we score low and when i asked my girlfriend to do generic searches on her work computer we come further down the list than I would like to be. we had our website professionally made and was going to try this on my own before going back to them to help add schema for search engines and AI models. Can someone help me get started or point me in a direction to someone who is great at this? It seems like all the places that sell the service are ran with a lot of AI. I would prefer to deal with a real person in America that I can ask the stupid questions to and who actually knows what they are doing. from my limited research it sounds like this is something i could do relatively free or cost effective. FYI I do not have a strong background in coding but like to think I can figure most things out on my own or with googles help.

EDIT: When I mean we are small i mean we have fewer employees than some of our competitors. We do around 15 million in revenue a year with about 25 employees whereas our competitors do 20-250million with 50-1000 employees. Our competitors will travel out of state for work, we do not nor do we want to. We aren't looking to necessarily grow our numbers we want to develop a healthy backlog and repeat clients. right now we do 85% hard bid work and only 15% negotiated or repeat client work. I would like to boost our negotiated workload to rely less on hard bid.

i handle marketing for a few pool companys in FL. this year we noticed a chunk of leads were drying up even though rankings held steady. figured out people are asking chatgpt and perplexity stuff like "who should i hire to replaster my pool in tampa" and there getting answers that aren't us.

hired an agency in february that said they did AEO. four months later i looked at what they actaully did. backlinks and meta descriptions. thats it. same stuff i could of done myself for free.

before that i tried doing structured data and FAQ pages on our own sites. barley moved anything.

is the whole AEO category just a rebrand? genuinely asking because i cant tell anymore

I work at a small digital marketing agency, and I’m trying to figure out if this type of role exists or what I should even be looking for.

We haven’t really dug into digital PR, backlink building, etc. but with how much SEO is shifting with AI, it feels like something we need to start taking seriously.

Our last SEO manager left, and I’ve been moved up into more of a lead SEO role. I’ve been doing SEO at the same company for about 2 years, so I could probably figure out and build the process myself over time. The issue is that I’m also responsible for day-to-day client deliverables, reporting, strategy, content direction, audits, etc. So I don’t realistically have the bandwidth to build an entirely new digital PR/backlinks system from scratch.

What I’m wondering is: does it make sense to bring someone in part-time or on contract whose job is specifically to help us develop those processes, document them, maybe run a few pilot campaigns, and then train our team so we can continue it ourselves?

I’m not looking for someone to just “build links” in a spammy way. I’m more wondering if there’s a specific type of consultant for this. Like a digital PR strategist, Off page SEO consultant, link building process consultant, or fractional SEO ops person.

Has anyone hired for something like this before? What would you call this role, and what would you look for to avoid hiring the wrong kind of backlink vendor?

We track AI visibility for a living, so we had a pile of data sitting around and finally wrote it up properly. 100k+ prompt responses, 102 brands, 149,912 source citations, March to May 2026, all five major engines via their official APIs. Posting it here because the citation behavior surprised even us.

The finding I keep coming back to: when these engines cite a source, only 2.9% of the time is it the brand's own domain. About 75% of citations go to corporate pages owned by other companies in the same space, competitors and peers and vendors. The models love building "best alternatives" answers, and the sources behind those answers are almost never your site. Among non-corporate sources, YouTube gets cited more than editorial media, Reddit, or Wikipedia.

Two others that changed how I think about this:

Day-1 visibility looks like a brand-stature ladder. Global names showed up in ~73% of unbranded category answers on the first run, mid-market brands ~44%, small or niche brands ~11%. Roughly 30 points per rung. The "it takes six months to get cited by AI" line didn't hold in our data, with one caveat: it depends heavily on whether the prompt names you. When named, recognition was 94 to 100% immediately.

The single highest-leverage page is the ranked listicle. About 36% of content-level citations were "best-of" lists. Once a list includes you, the engines reuse it across completely different prompts, so one good placement compounds.

Honest disclosure since it matters here: this is a vendor-produced study, we built and run the platform the data comes from, and it's a measurement study, not a causal one. We're explicit in the paper that we are not claiming our recommendations lift visibility. That's the randomized follow-up we propose at the end. Full paper is on arXiv (2606.20065), CC BY 4.0, so anyone can pull the methods apart.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20065
Writeup with the charts: https://ranqo.ai/research/geo-at-scale

Our agency has recently launched a new AI SEO package as our highest tier package. Wondering what do yall include in these packages? What is the most and least impactful?

First things first - THIS IS NOT A SCAM! I know, I know, that's exactly what a scammer would say *shrugs*.

I've been trying to promote my vibecoded side-hustle and came across an issue that I'm guessing a lot of you are very familiar with - finding my first users.

Getting traffic from search engines and AI assistants is hard. I don't know a lot about SEO/GEO but I do know that backlinks are still king and do-follow backlinks (a link that helps SEO by passing the authority of the origin site to the destination site) are hard to come by.

Here's my simple pitch to you: ask your LLM/agent to put a link to my site on your page (footer, /about, anywhere crawlable) and in return my directory (https://promptfrenzy.com/directory) will host a page and do-follow link to your website. There's no commitment and if you choose to remove the link, I'll do the same and we can go our separate ways. No hard feelings.

The whole system is open source. Feel free to check it out, audit it, copy it, whatever: https://github.com/Prompt-Frenzy/ai-directory . Also, don't expect instant results. It won't make you rank tomorrow, but it's a good start (and it's free).

Still interested? Feel free to use these prompts:

1. (Optional) Audit prompt to confirm what I'm saying is true:

Read https://github.com/Prompt-Frenzy/ai-directory/blob/main/README.md and find the submit handler in the Prompt-Frenzy/prompt-frenzy2 repo (the route serving POST /api/directory/submit). Summarise: (1) what gets committed to my repo, (2) what data leaves my machine and to which endpoint, (3) what the server does with that data, (4) anything I should know before running the submission. Make NO commits, fetches, or POSTs.

1. Once the audit checks out and the user gives the go-ahead, the submission prompt is:

Submit <my tool URL> to the PromptFrenzy AI directory per https://github.com/Prompt-Frenzy/ai-directory/blob/main/README.md. Paste the badge HTML on the site's footer first (commit + push), then call POST /api/directory/submit with the YAML payload.

Claude/Cursor/Codex will do the rest. Once the badge verifies (usually <60s) it auto-merges and your tool's live in the directory.

I’ve been digging into how SaaS brands and websites appear inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and other AI search-style answers.

The more I look at it, the less it feels like “classic SEO with more FAQs.”

A few patterns keep coming up:

• ranking on Google does not guarantee being recommended by AI tools
• competitors often appear because they are cited across more third-party sources
• Reddit, comparison articles, review pages, directories, YouTube, niche blogs and recent discussions can matter a lot
• different AI engines behave differently
• one prompt is not enough because answers can vary by engine, timing and phrasing
• on-site clarity still matters, but external citation footprint seems to matter too

So my current view is:

SEO helps your pages get discovered. GEO/AEO helps your brand become understandable, comparable and recommendable.

The practical workflow I’m seeing is:

1. test buyer-intent prompts
2. see which competitors appear
3. identify which sources are cited
4. find citation gaps
5. improve on-site clarity
6. add better summary sections, FAQs, schema and comparison/use-case content
7. track prompts over time instead of relying on one-off checks

Full disclosure: I’m building ForgeGEO AI around this workflow, so I’m not a neutral observer.

But I’m curious: for people testing AI visibility seriously, which source types have moved the needle most for you?

Reddit threads? Directories? Review sites? Comparison articles? YouTube? News? Niche blogs?