There's a quiet shift happening in how people find businesses online. AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews are rapidly becoming the first port of call for product and service discovery — and most websites are completely invisible to them. Not because of bad SEO. Not because of poor content. But because they haven't been optimised for the way AI systems crawl, read, and cite information.
AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity are reshaping how people discover businesses online
We ran a free AI Visibility scan across three real UK websites — including the BBC — and the results were eye-opening.
What Is AI Search Visibility (GEO)?
AI Search Visibility — sometimes called Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) — is the emerging discipline of making your website legible, trustworthy, and citable to AI-powered search tools. Where traditional SEO focuses on ranking in a list of blue links, GEO is about being the source an AI chooses to quote, cite, or summarise when someone asks it a question.
These AI systems don't work like Google's crawler. They look for structured data, clear authority signals, accessible crawl paths for their bots, and content that's written to be cited — not just keyword-matched. If your site doesn't speak their language, you simply won't appear in their answers.
Why It Matters in 2026
AI-driven search is no longer a future trend — it's the present reality. ChatGPT crossed 100 million weekly users. Perplexity is growing at pace. Google's AI Overviews now appear on the majority of commercial searches in the UK. Studies suggest that AI-generated answers are already reducing click-through rates on traditional organic results by 20–60% in some categories.
The businesses that invest in AI visibility now will own a disproportionate share of AI-assisted discovery in the next 12–24 months. Those who don't will find themselves increasingly invisible — not just to algorithms, but to the customers those algorithms serve.
The 8 Factors That Determine Your AI Visibility Score
Our AI Visibility Analyser evaluates your site across eight critical dimensions. Here's what each one means — and why it matters:
AI Crawler Access
Are GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot allowed to crawl your site? Many robots.txt files inadvertently block all bots — including AI training and retrieval crawlers.
llms.txt Standard
The new llms.txt standard lets you provide a structured, AI-readable summary of your site's content and purpose — helping LLMs understand and cite you accurately.
Schema Markup
JSON-LD structured data (Organisation, Product, Article, FAQ) tells AI systems exactly what your content is about — reducing ambiguity and increasing citation likelihood.
Content Citability
Is your content written in a way that an AI would confidently quote? Clear claims, factual statements, and well-structured prose all increase your citability score.
Brand Signals
Consistent brand mentions, a clear About page, and verified business information help AI systems build a confident entity profile for your business.
Technical SEO
Page speed, crawlability, canonical tags, and sitemap quality still matter — AI crawlers, like traditional ones, favour technically healthy websites.
E-E-A-T Authority
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness signals — author bios, credentials, external citations — all influence how confidently AI tools cite your content.
Social & OG Tags
Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata help AI tools correctly interpret and represent your pages when surfacing them in conversational or visual contexts.
What You Can Do Right Now
The good news is that AI visibility is highly actionable. Unlike traditional SEO — where results can take months and depend heavily on factors outside your control — many of the core improvements can be implemented in a matter of days. The barriers aren't technical complexity or budget. They're awareness and prioritisation.
The sites that will dominate AI-driven discovery in 2027 are the ones making these changes in 2026. Here's where to start:
⚡ Start Here: 3 Quick Wins for AI Visibility
- ✓ Update your robots.txt to explicitly allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot. By default many WordPress and platform-generated robots.txt files block all non-Google bots.
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Create an llms.txt file at
yoursite.com/llms.txt— a plain-text or markdown summary of your business, services, and key pages. Takes 30 minutes to create; can significantly improve how AI tools represent you. - ✓ Add JSON-LD schema markup to your key pages — at minimum, Organisation schema on your homepage and Article or Product schema on your core content pages.
Find Out Where You Stand — Free
Our free AI Visibility Analyser scans your website across all 8 factors and gives you a scored report with actionable recommendations. No signup required. Results in under 60 seconds.
Scan My Website Free →