How do I get cited by AI search engines?

Three prerequisites in strict order: AI crawlers must be able to fetch you, your content must be in the HTML without JavaScript, and independent sources must corroborate that you exist. Fail the first and nothing else counts.

Should I block AI crawlers?

It depends on how you make money. A publisher whose revenue depends on people arriving to read has a genuine argument for blocking. A business selling services does not — blocking removes you from the answer at the moment a buyer is asking who to hire.

Is my site visible to ChatGPT and other AI assistants?

Test it rather than assume. Fetch your home page with each AI crawler user-agent and read the status code — every line should be 200. A 403 means an edge proxy is refusing them before your server or robots.txt is ever consulted.

AI search

Do I need an llms.txt file?

No major AI crawler is known to require or obey llms.txt, so it is not a mechanism. It costs almost nothing if generated from data you already maintain, it is genuinely useful to humans evaluating you, and it cannot hurt — publish one and expect nothing.

Answered by Anas Bin Masud 187 words 3 sections

What it is and is not

A community proposal for a plain-text summary of a site at its root. There is no RFC, no adoption commitment from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or Perplexity, and no way to verify a model consulted it. Anyone selling it as required is overselling.

What to put in it if you do

One line saying what the business does and for whom
Services with URLs, price floors and typical timelines
Commercial terms — deposit, payment methods, what is included
Proof: live work with URLs
Practical facts: location, markets, hours, response time
Common questions with direct answers

The mistake

Writing it as a CV, and hand-maintaining it. A model does not need career history, and a hand-written file drifts from the site within a month — publishing stale prices in the format most likely to be quoted verbatim.

The longer version

This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, llms.txt: a fair assessment of a file nobody is obliged to read covers it in about 2 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who answered this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.