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.

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.

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.

AI search

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.

Answered by Anas Bin Masud 188 words 3 sections

After the prerequisites, extractability decides it

A direct answer in the first 40–60 words under a question-shaped heading
Self-contained sentences — no "as mentioned above", no backward pronouns
Specific checkable facts: numbers, dates, prices, versions
Tables, definition lists and ordered procedures, which extract far more reliably than prose
A visible author and date, so currency and expertise can be weighed

Why corroboration matters more than people expect

Answer engines avoid confidently citing an entity they cannot verify. If the only source claiming you exist is you, a model has no basis to name you specifically — particularly with a common name. Ten to fourteen consistent profiles is the practical threshold.

How to measure it

There is no Search Console for AI answers. Filter server logs by user-agent, track referrers from assistant domains, and ask a fixed set of ten buyer questions monthly across the major assistants, recording which sources get cited.

The longer version

This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, Generative Engine Optimization: being the source an AI answer quotes covers it in about 4 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.