Doing AEO
How do I optimize my website for AI visibility?
By the RankNext team · Updated July 2026
The short answer
Make your site machine-readable first: serve full HTML from the server, allow AI crawlers like GPTBot and PerplexityBot in robots.txt, put one literal H1 on each page, add schema markup, publish an llms.txt file, and keep pages fast. AI engines can only cite what they can fetch and parse cleanly, so structure comes before content.
The order matters here. Your website is the machine-readable half of AI visibility and content is the human-readable half; fix the machine side first, because engines cannot cite pages they cannot fetch and parse. Most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript, so a client-rendered site can look fine to visitors and read as nearly empty to the systems deciding who to recommend.
The site-side checklist is short and mostly one-time work: server-rendered HTML, robots.txt rules that admit GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot, one H1 per page that states the topic in plain words, JSON-LD schema for your business and services, an llms.txt file, and pages that load in a couple of seconds. We walk through each item, with what it looks like in practice, in our guide to AEO website structure.
Once the structure is sound, your content actually has a shot at being read and cited instead of skipped. For a quick read on where your site stands today, run it through our free AEO checker; it flags which of these basics you are missing in about a minute.
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