Questions and answers
Short answers to the questions we hear most about GEO, AI search and how AI agents read websites. Each one links to the article it comes from.
AI Search Statistics 2026: The Numbers That Matter
How many people use ChatGPT and other AI chatbots?
In the US, 49% of adults used AI chatbots in February 2026, up from 33% in 2024 (Pew Research Center; the 2024 base differed). Pew also found 34% of US adults had ever used ChatGPT in early 2025. OpenAI's own user counts are company-reported and appear only in the unverified box. Alphabet reported 950 million monthly active users for the Gemini app in Q2 2026.
Do AI Overviews reduce clicks?
Every study found lower click rates when an AI answer appears, but the size varies. Pew measured link clicks on 8% of visits with an AI summary versus 15% without (US, March 2025). Ahrefs found position-1 click-through rate (CTR) 34.5% lower in 2025 and about 58% lower in a 2026 update. Seer Interactive found organic CTR down 49.4% to 65.2% year on year in Q3 2025.
How often do AI answers cite sources correctly?
Not reliably. A 2023 Stanford study found 51.5% of generated sentences were fully supported by their citations. In February 2025 the Tow Center found chatbots gave incorrect answers to more than 60% of queries asking them to identify a news article's source. These measure different tasks and should not be combined into one trend.
How much web traffic comes from AI crawlers?
Cloudflare measured AI bots at 4.2% of HTML requests across its network between 1 January and 2 December 2025, against 4.5% for Googlebot. Cloudflare's customer base is not the whole web, so treat it as a network-level figure.
How many websites have an llms.txt file?
Between 2.1% and 28%, depending on who is counted. The HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2025 found 2.10% of mobile sites, SE Ranking 10.13% of nearly 300,000 domains, Common Crawl 11.72% of sampled URLs in July 2026, and Ahrefs 28% of 137,210 domains in May 2026 (a technical customer base).
Does llms.txt help visibility in AI answers?
None of the studies we found measured a benefit. SE Ranking found no correlation with AI citations across nearly 300,000 domains. Ahrefs found 97% of llms.txt files received zero requests in May 2026. Google's documentation says llms.txt will neither harm nor help visibility in Google Search.
Do AI crawlers respect robots.txt?
It depends on the bot and the task. Anthropic says its bots respect robots.txt. Perplexity's documentation says Perplexity-User generally ignores it because the fetch is user-triggered. An academic study of 130 self-declared bots found AI search crawlers rarely check robots.txt at all. Cloudflare alleged in 2025 that Perplexity also used undeclared crawlers.
How big is the GEO and AEO tools market?
No analyst-grade market size is publicly available. Hard numbers come from public companies: Semrush reported FY2025 revenue of $443.6M and AI-products annual recurring revenue (ARR) above $38M, up from $4M a year earlier. Adobe agreed to acquire Semrush for about $1.9B in equity value, closed 28 April 2026.
Agentic Navigability: How AI Agents Read Your Site
What is agentic navigability?
Agentic navigability is how well an AI agent can reach, crawl and understand a website by following its links. It depends on whether pages are reachable, linked from other content, readable without special tricks, and not blocked by mistake.
What is agentic citability?
Agentic citability is how likely a page's content is to be quoted in an AI answer. It depends on clear definitions, direct answers near the top of a section, named entities, sources, visible dates and authorship, and one clear page per topic.
What is the difference between agentic navigability and agentic citability?
Navigability is about access and understanding: can an agent find and read your pages? Citability is about use: once it has read them, will it quote them? A site can be easy to navigate and still not citable, and the reverse is rarely true.
Is agentic navigability the same as SEO for ChatGPT or LLM SEO?
They overlap, but they are not identical. SEO for ChatGPT and LLM SEO are search phrases for getting found and cited by AI assistants. Agentic navigability and citability name the two properties of your site that decide whether that can happen, and they can be measured.
Does blocking GPTBot remove my site from ChatGPT?
Not necessarily. OpenAI documents separate crawlers: GPTBot for training, OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, and ChatGPT-User for user-initiated fetches. According to OpenAI, sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.
Do AI crawlers obey robots.txt?
Vendors say their main crawlers do, but behaviour varies. OpenAI and Perplexity document that user-initiated fetchers may ignore robots.txt, and an academic study found that some categories of bots, including AI search crawlers, rarely check it at all.
Do I need an llms.txt file?
No. Google states that you do not need new machine-readable or AI text files to appear in Google Search, and that llms.txt will neither harm nor help. It costs little to publish, but no study we found shows that it increases citations.
Do I need structured data to be cited by AI?
Google says structured data is not required for generative AI search. A preprint of 1,702 citations did find structured data, semantic HTML and metadata associated with more citations on English B2B SaaS pages. Treat it as good hygiene, not as a guarantee.
Why do orphan pages matter for AI agents?
An orphan page has no internal links pointing to it. An agent that discovers pages by following links has no path to it, so it can be missed even if it is in your sitemap. No published study has measured the size of this effect yet.
How do I measure agentic navigability?
GraphoRank crawls your site, rebuilds it as a graph of pages and links, and scores it from 0 to 100 as GraphRank across four dimensions: structure, meaning, AI visibility and technical health. A free audit covers the first 10 pages.
Is the GraphRank methodology public?
The four dimensions and what each one looks at are public. The exact formula is proprietary, so that the score stays comparable across sites and cannot be gamed. Every site is measured the same way on every scan.
AI SEO: How to Get Found and Cited in AI Search
What is AI SEO?
AI SEO is the practice of making a website easy for AI search engines to crawl, understand, quote and link to. It builds on classic SEO: pages must still be crawlable and indexed, and the content must answer real questions clearly. The goal is to be cited in AI answers, not only to rank in a list of links.
Is AI SEO different from classic SEO?
Mostly it is classic SEO plus a few new decisions. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet. The new decisions are which AI crawlers you allow, whether your key facts are easy to quote, and how you measure visibility inside AI answers.
Do I need llms.txt for AI SEO?
No evidence in this guide's sources shows that it helps. Google's documentation says llms.txt will neither harm nor help visibility in Google Search. SE Ranking found no correlation between having the file and being cited, and Ahrefs found that 97% of the llms.txt files it observed received zero requests in May 2026. It is cheap to add but not a priority.
Do I need special schema markup to appear in AI Overviews?
Google says no: structured data is not required for generative AI search, and no special schema.org markup is needed for AI Overviews or AI Mode. A preprint on citation behaviour found structured data and semantic HTML associated with more citations, but that study is observational and covers English-language B2B software pages.
If I block GPTBot, will I disappear from ChatGPT search?
No. OpenAI documents GPTBot as the training crawler and OAI-SearchBot as the crawler for ChatGPT search. Blocking GPTBot does not remove you from ChatGPT search answers. Blocking OAI-SearchBot does, and OpenAI says it takes about 24 hours to apply.
Does robots.txt control every AI bot?
No. OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to ChatGPT-User, which acts on a person's request, and Perplexity says Perplexity-User generally ignores robots.txt for the same reason. A study of 130 self-declared bots also found that some categories, including AI search crawlers, rarely check robots.txt.
Does Google-Extended affect my Google rankings or AI Overviews?
Google says Google-Extended controls whether content is used to train future Gemini models and for grounding, and that it does not affect inclusion in Google Search and is not a ranking signal. Google's page does not mention AI Overviews in that description.
How do I know if AI search sends me traffic?
For Google, AI feature traffic is counted in Search Console under the Web search type, mixed with ordinary results, so it cannot be separated there. For other engines, check your analytics for referral sources such as chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai, and use a visibility tracker if you want to see which answers cite you.
Do AI answers actually reduce clicks?
Most measurements say yes, by very different amounts. Pew found people clicked a result on 8% of visits with an AI summary versus 15% without. Ahrefs measured a 58% lower click-through rate for the top result in its 2026 update. Google says total organic click volume has been relatively stable. The studies measure different things.
Do I need an AI SEO tool?
Not to start. The first 30 days of the plan need only a browser, your robots.txt, Search Console and a list of real customer questions. Tools become useful once you want to track many prompts over time or audit a large site. Pick the category (tracker, structure analysis or SEO suite) that matches the question you need answered.
How long does AI SEO take to work?
No source in the research behind this guide measures a typical time to results, so any promise would be a guess. What is verifiable is what you control: crawler access, page quality and structure can be fixed within weeks. Whether an engine then cites you is up to the engine.
Generative Engine Optimization: The Complete Guide
What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your content easy for AI answer systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews to find, understand and cite when they write a response. It aims at being a source inside the answer, not a link in a list.
Is GEO SEO under a new name?
No, but they overlap. Google's own guidance says a page must be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet in Search to be used in its AI features, which are classic SEO basics. GEO adds a different goal: being cited inside a written answer, across several engines.
Where does the term GEO come from?
It comes from a 2023 research paper, 'GEO: Generative Engine Optimization' by Aggarwal and colleagues, published at KDD 2024. It introduced a benchmark called GEO-bench and reported that content changes can raise visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40%, with results varying by domain.
Do I need structured data or an llms.txt file to be cited?
For Google Search, no. Google says structured data is not required for generative AI search and that llms.txt will neither harm nor help. One large study of nearly 300,000 domains found no correlation between having llms.txt and being cited. Other engines are not covered by Google's statement.
Should I block GPTBot or ClaudeBot?
That depends on what you want. Training crawlers and search crawlers are separate. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, while GPTBot relates to model training. Decide for each bot, and review your robots.txt on purpose.
Does earned media matter more than my own site?
In controlled experiments by Chen and colleagues, AI search showed a systematic and overwhelming bias towards earned media (independent third-party coverage) over brand-owned and social content. This is a preprint, and the abstract gives no numbers. It suggests that being discussed by independent sources matters.
Are AI citations accurate?
Not reliably. A 2023 Stanford-led study found only 51.5% of generated sentences were fully supported by their citations. The Tow Center found chatbots gave incorrect answers to more than 60% of source-identification queries in 2025. Being cited is not the same as being represented correctly.
How do I measure GEO?
Track a fixed set of questions across the engines your customers use, record whether and how your site is cited, and repeat on a schedule. Pair that with a check of your site's crawl access and structure. No standard metric exists, so document your method.
How long until GEO changes show up?
No source in the research we reviewed gives a timeline. OpenAI says robots.txt changes apply to its search bot in about 24 hours, but that covers access, not citation. Re-run your tracked questions after changes and compare, rather than expecting a fixed delay.
Do AI engines send much traffic?
Cloudflare measured crawl-to-referral ratios in July 2025 of about 1,091 crawls per referred visit for OpenAI and about 195 for Perplexity, against 5.4 for Google. Those figures come from Cloudflare's network only and mix training and search crawling, but they show AI answers return far fewer visits per crawl.
Where should a small business start?
Start with access and basics: make sure the crawlers you want can reach your pages, that key pages are indexable, and that each page answers its main question in plain sentences. Then add specifics and sources, check how others describe you, and track results.
llms.txt: What It Is and How to Create One
What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a proposed convention: a Markdown file placed on your website that gives AI agents a short summary of the site and links to its most useful pages.
Who created llms.txt?
Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI proposed it, with the original proposal published on 3 September 2024. It is documented at llmstxt.org.
Is llms.txt an official standard?
No. It is a community proposal, not an internet standard, and no AI company is obliged to support it.
Do ChatGPT, Google or Claude read llms.txt?
We found no primary source from an AI provider confirming that its assistant reads llms.txt. Google's documentation says you do not need new AI text files to appear in its AI features.
Where do I put the llms.txt file?
The proposal says it can sit at the root of your site, for example /llms.txt, or at a subpath, where it covers the URLs under that path.
Is llms.txt the same as robots.txt?
No. robots.txt tells crawlers which URLs they may access. llms.txt offers a readable guide to your content. It does not grant or block access.
SEO vs AEO vs GEO, in Plain Words
What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?
SEO aims to rank pages in search results. AEO (answer engine optimization) aims to supply direct answers to questions. GEO (generative engine optimization) aims to have your content used and cited in answers written by generative AI. The three overlap heavily.
Is AEO the same as GEO?
Not exactly. AEO is an informal industry label for winning direct answers to questions. GEO has a specific origin in a 2023 research paper and focuses on generative AI responses. In practice many tactics are shared.
Is 'AI SEO' a separate discipline?
No. 'AI SEO' is a popular catch-all term for SEO work aimed at AI-powered search. We found no formal definition, and it mostly covers the same ground as AEO and GEO.
Should I stop doing SEO and switch to GEO?
No. Google says SEO best practices remain relevant for its AI features, and eligibility for AI Overviews depends on a page being indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet.
What should I do first?
Make sure crawlers can reach your key pages, answer the main question of each page near the top, and back claims with sources. These steps help in classic search and in AI answers.
What Is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
What does GEO stand for?
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization: improving how often and how prominently your content appears in the answers that generative AI systems write.
Is GEO the same as SEO?
No, but they overlap heavily. SEO aims at ranking in a list of search results. GEO aims at being used and cited inside a written AI answer. Google says SEO best practices remain relevant for its AI features.
Who coined the term GEO?
Researchers Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande introduced it in the paper 'GEO: Generative Engine Optimization', first posted to arXiv in November 2023 and accepted to KDD 2024.
Does keyword stuffing help in AI answers?
In the paper's tests it did not. The authors report that keyword stuffing offered little to no improvement in generative engine responses.
Do I need special files or markup for Google's AI Overviews?
Google's documentation says there are no additional requirements, no special optimizations and no new machine-readable or AI text files needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.