36 articles
We pointed our 5-signal GEO checker at five companies that sell AI-visibility tracking. Scores: 100, 70, 55, 55, 40. Four fail their own medicine — and the failures are the same ones we see everywhere
From our July 2026 crawl of the Tranco top 5,000: 11% of the top 100 serve a spec-valid llms.txt vs 7.4% for ranks 101–5,000. Adoption concentrates at the very top of the web.
Across the 13 domains our probes have logged so far, 13/13 pass robots.txt for AI bots — while 7 of 13 fail or half-fail JSON-LD schema and 6 of 13 stumble on llms.txt. The gap, in numbers.
Vercel.com is AI-ready with strong visibility, passing 4 of 5 core signals for AI-generated answers.
GEO/AEO Playbooks now runs an MCP server: live 5-signal site audits, llms.txt linting, knowledge-base search and the Pulse benchmark — callable natively from Claude Code, Cursor or any MCP client.
Our hourly GEO Pulse probe scored openai.com 20/100 on July 12, 2026: robots.txt allows every AI crawler, but the homepage answers HTTP 403. The robots-vs-WAF gap, explained.
GEO for hotels means getting your hotel cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI. A 5-point hotel GEO audit, plus the July 2026 finding: 12 of the top 13 results are vendors, not auditors.
GEO for real estate gets ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI to recommend your brokerage. The 5 signals to fix — and why no GEO specialist owns this term yet.
GEO for healthcare gets your clinic named when patients ask ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews for a provider. No independent GEO practice ranks for the term — vertical agencies and name-clash sites hol
GEO for SaaS: get your product named when buyers ask AI for the best tool in your category. Who AI cites today, a 5-signal mini-audit, and the 3 fixes in order.
A GEO playbook for online stores — the 5-signal store audit, the fixes in order, and the real July 2026 SERP finding on who AI actually cites for ecommerce.
For "geo for dentists" (Google US, July 2026), all 20 top results are dental agencies. Zero are GEO specialists. Here is the 5-check audit that decides if ChatGPT names your practice.
On the "geo for law firms" page (July 9, 2026), all 7 sources Google's AI Overview cited were legal-marketing vendors or trade press. Zero GEO specialists. The 5-signal audit and the fixes that get a
SEO earns rankings and clicks. GEO earns citations inside AI answers. 61 of 98 results explain the difference — here's the transfer data, checked.
GEO earns citations inside AI answers, not rankings. Only 3 of the 16 sources its own AI Overview cites rank in the top 10. Mechanics, evidence, workflow.
Crawl access, retrieval, and an extractable answer capsule — 72.4% of LLM-cited posts carry one. The citation data, a $0 test protocol, and six steps.
Answer engine optimization (AEO) structures content so featured snippets, People Also Ask, and AI answers can extract and cite it. Checked against 49 live SERPs, July 2026.
The three AI visibility formulas. A $0 prompt-sampling protocol to run them. How often to re-check. The vendor-neutral answer to the AI search black box.
AEO earns extraction — snippets, PAA, AI answers. SEO earns rankings and clicks. Nine practices scored by effort and impact on a July 2026 SERP snapshot.
AEO targets extractable answers. GEO targets citations in AI-generated responses. Zero top-10 URL overlap between the two SERPs in July 2026 — the evidence, checked.
Query fan out is when an AI engine splits one prompt into 5 to 15 sub-queries. It cites sources by how often they appear across the set. Here is how it works.
Prompt volume is the estimated rate a prompt is asked of AI engines. It is the GEO analog of search volume. No platform counts it, so vendors guess it.
llms.txt gives AI systems a curated Markdown map of your site. Publishing is real. Crawler pickup is near zero. The dated evidence from both camps, refereed.
12 real llms.txt examples, fetched and annotated. See what Cloudflare, GitHub and Pydantic get right. See what Anthropic gets wrong. Plus copy-paste templates for four site types.
LLMO means large language model optimization. It gets AI models to cite your brand. It is GEO under another name.
GSVO is Otterly.ai's label for GEO. See what it means. See where it came from. Then map it to GEO, AEO, and LLMO.
A GEO agency gets you cited in AI answers, not ranked in blue links. 74 of the top 88 results for "geo agency" sell one. Evaluate deliverables, pricing, and red flags before you sign.
ClaudeBot is Anthropic's web crawler. Its robots.txt token is ClaudeBot. Verify it by IP, not the user-agent string. Block it and you leave Claude's answer pool.
A glossary of GEO and AEO terms. Query fan-out, answer capsule, LLMO, GSVO, AI share of voice, agentic commerce, prompt volume. Each one defined and sourced.
"Rank in ChatGPT" is three games: get mentioned, cited, recommended. The mechanism (Bing index, OAI-SearchBot), a dated first-person test, and what moves it.
AEO services are worth it for off-site work you cannot do in-house. They are a waste when they are rebranded SEO. Of 98 ranked pages, 60 sell the service and 1 asks if it is worth it.
94 of 96 guides say "rank"; zero say "business". Get your business recommended by ChatGPT: a 5-minute test, six free fixes, one agent check.
An answer capsule is a short, self-contained 40–60-word answer under a heading. AI engines lift it into ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews.
AI share of voice is the share of AI answers that name your brand. You measure it against tracked rivals. The formula is your mentions over all tracked mentions, times 100. It is the core GEO metric.
Agentic commerce is when an AI agent buys for a person. What is real vs announced in 2026, and why it decides who AI recommends.
Ten AI crawlers fetch your pages in 2026. This is the live table of their operators, robots.txt tokens, and how to verify each one. Plus when blocking is the right call.
