Guides for the AI-readable web
Long-form, citation-heavy, no fluff. Everything we know about making your brand legible to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity — taught the way we wish someone had taught us.
AEO 101
The Complete Guide
The definitive reference for Answer Engine Optimization
If you read one thing on this site, read this. Eight chapters covering what AEO is, why it isn't SEO, how AI models actually read your pages, and the eleven specific things to ship this quarter.
AEO Basics
8 guidesFoundational concepts. Start here if you've never optimized for answer engines before.
The 9-point AEO checklist
The exact audit we run on every free scan. Print it, run it, ship the fixes.
AEO vs SEO: a side-by-side comparison
Forty-two differences, ranked by how much they actually matter. Most "experts" focus on the wrong fifteen.
Why AI models can't read your homepage
The five rendering pitfalls — client-side JS, lazy hydration, hidden text — that hide your content from models.
Schema & JSON-LD
11 guidesThe structured data that makes your facts machine-readable. Heavy on copy-paste-able code.
JSON-LD for SaaS: the Organization type
The single most important schema you'll ship. Get this right and AI models stop confabulating your founding year.
Product schema, done right
Pricing, SKUs, availability. The four fields models always check, and the eight they ignore.
FAQPage and how-to schema audit
Models love structured Q&A. They hate when you mark up content they can't find on the page. Here's the diff.
Validation tooling: rich-results tester vs schema.org
Three free validators, ranked. One is wrong about half the time. Worth knowing which.
The pricing-page anti-patterns
"Contact us" pricing is the #1 reason ChatGPT can't answer "what does X cost". Here's what to do instead.
Schema for multi-brand companies
Multi-brand holding companies can have ten brands. Each needs its own Organization schema. Here's the hierarchy that actually works.
llms.txt
6 guidesThe new robots.txt for AI crawlers. Less mature, more impactful — for now.
The complete llms.txt spec, explained
What goes in, what doesn't, and what the spec gets wrong. Includes a copy-paste template for SaaS.
Generating llms.txt from your docs
The five-line script that turns any markdown docs site into a model-readable manifest. Open source.
llms-full.txt: when to ship it, when to skip it
The full-content variant is overkill for most. Here are the three situations where it's worth the file size.
Model Coverage
9 guidesModel-specific quirks. What ChatGPT cares about that Gemini doesn't, and vice versa.
ChatGPT (GPT-4o) source preferences
Which domains GPT-4o trusts, which it ignores, and how to get on the "trusted" list without paying anyone.
Gemini and the Google knowledge graph
Gemini's grounding is unique. Here's how to feed the knowledge graph directly via Wikidata and Google Business Profile.
Perplexity: optimizing for cited answers
Perplexity is the easiest model to influence — and the most public about it. Here's the citation playbook.