EZY FAQ - Getting Found by ChatGPT, Claude, and AI Search

Answer Engine Optimization (or Optimisation, in British spelling) means optimizing your website for answer engines - the AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, built on large language models, that have exploded in popularity since ChatGPT launched in 2022.

Businesses have started asking a simple question: when a customer asks an AI for “the best [product or service] in [my location],” does my business come up - and how much revenue am I losing if it doesn’t? SEO meant being number one on Google. AEO means showing up in AI answers.

In practice, AEO is the work of making your website the source AI assistants use when they answer questions about your industry, your services, or your location. When someone asks ChatGPT or Claude “who’s the best physio in Leeds” or “which agency builds bilingual sites in Dubai,” the AI picks a handful of businesses to name. AEO is how you become one of them. You’ll also hear it called GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), LLMO, or AI SEO. Same discipline, different names.

Three conditions have to hold. Your site must let OpenAI’s crawlers in - GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot in your robots.txt. Your pages must state facts plainly enough to quote: what you do, where you are, what it costs, in clear sentences near the top of the page. And your site needs content that answers real questions in the form people ask them, because ChatGPT’s browsing mode looks for pages that already contain the answer.

EZY handles all three: it generates and uploads a robots.txt that admits AI crawlers, structures your key facts so they’re liftable, and publishes question-led content grounded in your actual business. Then it tracks whether ChatGPT is actually naming you.

For the full mechanics, read our guide to get more customers from ChatGPT.

The same fundamentals apply, with Anthropic’s crawler. Claude’s web search reads sites that allow ClaudeBot in robots.txt, and it favors pages where the answer is explicit: a clear statement of what the business does, current details, and content that matches the question. If your robots.txt blocks ClaudeBot - and plenty of default configurations do - Claude cannot cite you, no matter how good the site is.

Two Claude-specific details are worth knowing. First, Claude’s live web search has been widely reported to run on Brave Search rather than Google, and independent analyses show heavy overlap between the URLs Claude cites and Brave’s top organic results - so your visibility in Brave Search directly feeds your visibility in Claude. Second, Claude weighs the page itself more than the domain’s reputation: it favors high factual density and clear structure, where each section is a self-contained, liftable answer with its facts stated outright.

EZY’s generated robots.txt admits ClaudeBot alongside the other major AI crawlers, and EZY’s prompt tracker shows you whether Claude mentions your business when your target questions are asked. We go deeper in our guide to get more customers from Claude.

Think of it as four layers, built in order:

• Foundations - the files that let AI in and tell it where to look: robots.txt admitting the AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended), llms.txt and llms-full.txt mapping your key pages, and a plainly stated facts file. A service that only exists inside an image or a JavaScript tab is invisible to every AI on earth.
• Structure - schema markup and metadata, so machines read your pages the way you intend instead of guessing.
• Answers - the content layer: articles, listicles, and FAQs written in the question-and-answer form people actually use, because that’s the shape AI answers are built from.
• Proof - tracking your prompts, reading the analytics, searching the AIs yourself, watching where they actually pull answers from (including Reddit and forums), and refining what you publish based on what shows up.

Do all four consistently and you’re ahead of most of the internet. EZY automates the first three layers and gives you the fourth as a dashboard.

llms.txt is a plain-text file at your site’s root that lists your most important pages and what they contain, written for AI systems the way robots.txt is written for crawlers. It’s an emerging standard, and adoption is growing because it solves a real problem: AI systems have limited time on your site, and llms.txt tells them where the value is.

You need one for the same reason you need a sitemap. EZY generates yours from your actual site structure, keeps it current, and uploads it automatically on WordPress and Cloudflare. More detail in our llms.txt explainer.

Completely. robots.txt is the permission layer: if it disallows GPTBot, ChatGPT’s crawler never reads your site. If it disallows ClaudeBot, Claude can’t cite you. Many sites block these crawlers without knowing it, through old rules or overly broad security defaults - and then wonder why they never appear in AI answers.

EZY audits your current robots.txt, generates a corrected version that admits the AI crawlers you want, and uploads it for you.

SEO earns you a position on a results page the user still has to read; AEO earns you a place inside the answer itself. That’s the whole difference, and it changes what you optimize for. Rankings reward keywords and links. AI answers reward clarity, liftable facts, and content that matches the question - an AI assistant names two or three businesses and moves on, and there is no page two.

The good news: the two reinforce each other. Everything EZY builds for AI visibility - clean structure, plain facts, question-led content, schema - is also what modern Google rewards.

There’s no fixed timeline, and anyone quoting one is guessing. AI assistants that search the live web - ChatGPT with browsing, Claude with web search, Perplexity - can pick up your changes as soon as they recrawl, which can be days. Visibility in answers builds from there as your content starts matching more of the questions people ask.

That’s why EZY tracks instead of promises: your dashboard shows, prompt by prompt and week by week, whether the AIs are naming you - and whether they’re naming your competitors instead.

EZY makes your website the source AI assistants cite, then proves it’s happening. In practice: it analyzes your site the way an AI crawler does, generates and uploads your robots.txt and llms.txt, fixes your schema and meta structure, publishes question-led blog content grounded in your real business facts, and tracks your visibility across the major AI models - including how you compare against your competitors.

You install it, and the system runs. It’s built to be fully automated at every step.

Every prompt you track is run three times against each AI model, because AI answers vary from run to run - a single query proves nothing. Three runs show you consistency: whether you appear every time, sometimes, or never. Your competitors get the exact same treatment, three runs each, so the comparison is fair.

The result is a dashboard that shows real visibility over time instead of a screenshot of one lucky answer.

Every post is grounded in your website’s truth. The system learns your tone of voice from your existing pages, pulls its facts from your actual site, verifies location details through the Google API, and weaves in internal links to your service pages plus a clear call to action. Before anything publishes, the post passes automated fact-checks: every business claim has to trace back to your site or verified data. A post that fails its checks is blocked, not published.

That last part matters. Most AI writers publish whatever they generate. EZY’s pipeline is built to refuse a post that fails.

Read more about what EZY does with your website.

Thin, generic AI content will. Grounded content won’t - Google’s own guidance targets unhelpful content regardless of who or what wrote it, and rewards pages that demonstrate real knowledge of a real business. EZY’s posts are built from your actual services, locations, and facts, carry proper schema, and answer specific questions, which is the opposite of the mass-produced filler the ranking systems punish.

The honest rule: content gets penalized for being useless, not for being generated.

Yes. The free plan is built for WordPress and Cloudflare sites and includes the full analytics suite plus generation, optimization, and automatic upload of your robots.txt and llms.txt. That’s not a trial and not a teaser - it’s the complete visibility foundation. The more advanced features come with EZY Pro: full content generation, schema and metadata optimization, and more.

Current plans and what each includes are on our pricing page. Pricing is built for real businesses, not enterprise procurement - one page, no sales call required.

Yes, and it activates automatically: the moment you add a second paid domain, your dashboard converts into an agency account. From there you can white-label the report PDFs your clients receive, set your own slug for each client’s blog and FAQ pages, and customize the comments inside the core AEO files - robots.txt and llms.txt - so everything a client sees carries your brand.

Agencies use EZY to add a recurring AEO service line without building the tooling themselves.

EZY integrates with WordPress and Cloudflare, which covers the majority of business websites: the plugin handles publishing, file uploads, and updates automatically on both. If your site runs on something else, contact us and we’ll tell you honestly whether the current setup fits.

No. Install the plugin, connect your site, and the system takes it from there - analysis, file generation, uploads, publishing, and tracking all run automatically. The dashboard is built to be read, not operated.

Open the dashboard. It shows every tracked prompt, whether each AI model mentioned you across its three runs, how that changes week over week, and how you stack against each tracked competitor. AI visibility stops being a feeling and becomes a number you can watch move.