Built to be found — by people and AI
AI is becoming a front door to the web. Here is what optimizing for it actually involves — and the pipeline we run on every product we ship.
Work with usWhat “AI optimization” actually means
People increasingly ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews instead of scrolling ten blue links — and autonomous agents are starting to browse and act on a person’s behalf. AI optimization (often called GEO — generative engine optimization, or AEO — answer engine optimization) is the work of making your site or app one of the sources those systems can read, trust, cite, and operate.
It overlaps with SEO but isn’t the same discipline: ranking #1 on Google no longer guarantees you appear in an AI answer. Being cited is its own game.
Small today — but high-intent and growing
AI referrals are still a small slice of total traffic. But they’re high-intent, they’re growing quickly, and the people arriving through them are usually deeper in a decision. So we treat this as future-proofing done in parallel with classic search — never as a replacement for it. No single trick makes you show up in an AI answer; it’s the sum of the steps below.
How we make a product AI-ready
Five steps, applied in order. The first two are table stakes, the third is the strongest lever, the last two keep it honest.
Can the machine read you?
If the content isn’t in the raw HTML, it doesn’t exist for AI. Today’s AI
crawlers don’t run JavaScript, so the meaningful content has to be
server-rendered or static — not loaded in after the page boots. On top of that:
clean semantic URLs, a valid sitemap, fast loads, and a robots.txt
that actually lets the AI search bots in. One overzealous firewall rule is
enough to make you invisible in an entire assistant.
Content built to be extracted
We write and mark up pages so a model can lift a clean, correct answer straight off them: the direct answer first, sections that make sense on their own, question-shaped headings, comparisons as tables, and clear definitions. Under the hood, structured data (schema.org) ties your pages into one machine-readable entity graph — so the AI understands what you are, not just what words are on the page.
Become a source AI trusts
For “best X for Y” questions, AI mostly repeats what the wider web says about you — not what your own homepage claims. So we work the off-site signals that actually move the needle: getting you into the right comparison lists and directories, earning brand mentions and reviews, and making you legible as a recognised entity. This is the strongest lever, and the slowest — it can’t be faked in code.
Make your product callable
For products, AI readiness also means being operable, not just readable. On native apps that’s App Intents and deep links, so assistants can trigger real actions inside your app. On web and SaaS it’s clean public docs and, where it fits, an MCP server or API — so an agent can work with the product, not only read about it. This is where most teams aren’t looking yet.
Prove it’s working
We instrument it so it’s not guesswork: a dedicated AI-traffic segment in analytics, periodic manual checks of how you actually appear in ChatGPT / Perplexity / Google, and server-log monitoring to confirm the AI crawlers are visiting at all. If we can’t measure a change, we don’t claim it.
What we won’t sell you
We won’t bill you for an llms.txt file and promise it lifts citations —
there’s no evidence it does. We won’t claim schema markup “guarantees” you get cited.
And we won’t tell you AI search replaces SEO. The field shifts every few weeks; we track
what’s proven, flag what’s still a guess, and tell you the difference.
Want your site or app AI-ready?
It’s already part of how we build — and we can audit an existing product the same way, then hand you a prioritised fix list.
Reach out: my@addicted.design