How to Get Found & Cited by AI Search (Playbook)

To get found and cited by AI, your site has to be reachable, readable, and trustworthy to machines. That comes down to three foundations: let AI crawlers in, add an llms.txt, and mark up your content with structured data. This playbook walks each one, in order of impact.

The guides in this playbook

• How to Let AI Crawlers Access Your Site (Step by Step) — Make sure GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are not blocked in robots.txt — the first step to being visible in AI search.
• How to Add an llms.txt File to Your Site (Step by Step) — Create and publish an llms.txt — a curated map of your site for AI models. Fewer than half of sites have one.
• How to Add Structured Data (Schema) for AI Search — Add JSON-LD structured data so AI engines can label your content instead of guessing what it is.
• How to Write Content That AI Engines Cite — AI engines cite content that answers directly, is structured for extraction, and backs claims with specifics.
• How to Fix Canonical Tags, Meta & Open Graph for AI — Clean canonical, title, meta description, and Open Graph tags help AI parse and preview your pages correctly.

Why these three first

In our scan of ~60 sites, 29% were quietly blocking AI crawlers, 54% had no llms.txt, and 41% lacked complete structured data. These are the most common, highest-impact gaps — and the fastest to fix. Work through them in order, then re-check your score.

Do it automatically

Run your URL through the free SEO Agent to see which of these you are missing, or use the AI-Fix Generator to produce the llms.txt, schema, and robots rules from your own site. To understand the scoring, see how the AI-readiness score works.