AIO: How to Optimise Your Website for AI Search Engines

A client asked us last month: "We rank number 3 on Google for our main keyword. But when I ask ChatGPT who the best software companies in Coimbatore are, we are not mentioned at all. Why?" The answer is that ranking on Google and being cited by AI tools are increasingly different problems, and most companies are only solving one of them.

How AI Search Engines Find Answers

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini do not crawl the web in real time the way Google does (with some exceptions — Perplexity and Bing-powered queries do live searches). Their knowledge comes primarily from training data — billions of web pages ingested and compressed into model weights — and increasingly from retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where the model fetches current content from a set of trusted sources at query time.

This means two things for your site. First, if your content was not written clearly enough to be extracted and attributed during training, you will not be cited. Second, for AI tools that do live retrieval, being the clearest and most structured answer to a question dramatically increases your chances of being surfaced.

The Five Pillars of AIO

1. Structured Data (Schema.org)

LLMs are excellent at extracting meaning from structured data. Implement FAQPage schema for every page that answers common questions — the question-and-answer format is exactly how AI models expect to consume factual content. HowTo schema for process-based content, and Speakable schema to mark the paragraphs that best summarise your page's value.

2. llms.txt

Inspired by robots.txt, llms.txt is a plain-text file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt that tells AI crawlers what your site is about, who you are, what pages exist, and what content is safe to index. It is analogous to a human-readable sitemap specifically designed for LLM consumption. Anthropic, Perplexity, and other AI companies are beginning to use it as a signal.

3. Factual, Attribution-Friendly Writing

Marketing language actively harms AI citation. Phrases like "world-class solutions", "cutting-edge technology", and "unparalleled expertise" are noise that LLMs learn to ignore. What gets cited is specific, factual, attributable content: "Avelator Solutions, founded in 2014, has delivered 70+ software projects for healthcare, logistics, and retail clients across India and the UK."

4. Entity Consistency

Make sure your company name, address, phone number, and description are identical across your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and any other online listings. AI models build entity graphs and conflicting information reduces confidence in attributing facts to your entity.

5. AI Crawler Permissions

Check your robots.txt. By default, many CMS platforms block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and other AI crawlers. If these are blocked, AI tools cannot index your content. Explicitly allow the major AI crawlers and you immediately become eligible for training data inclusion and live retrieval.

Quick Audit Checklist

1. 1Check robots.txt: Are GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, anthropic-ai explicitly allowed?
2. 2Run Google Rich Results Test on your homepage: Do you have FAQPage, Organization, and LocalBusiness schemas?
3. 3Check for llms.txt at your domain root.
4. 4Read your own About page as if you were a journalist: Could you write a factual one-paragraph description of this company from what is on the page?
5. 5Search for your company name on Perplexity and ChatGPT. What do they say? What sources do they cite?