Guides
How answer engines choose sources, and what to do about it.
AI Citation Matrix: How Answer Engines Pick Sources How Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Gemini find the pages they cite, what you control, and what studies found. 25 AI crawler user agents and what each does in robots.txt 25 AI crawler user agents from 12 operators in four groups, with how many of 157 platforms block each in robots.txt. Read on 11 November 2026. Answer-First Content for AI Search How to write pages that people and retrieval systems can pull a core claim from, and what the evidence says about formats, schema and entities. Free AI search readiness audit with Awesome GEO tools Five steps with Awesome GEO's free browser tools to check crawler access, robots.txt, schema, assistant answers and AI traffic on one website. Check if your site blocks AI crawlers with Site check Awesome GEO's free Site check shows what your robots.txt says about each AI crawler and the HTTP status your server returns to each one. llms.txt and AI search: evidence, and how to build the file No AI assistant has said it reads llms.txt for citations. For docs sites: build the file with a free tool, then check your server log for requests to it. Best free GEO tools: 6 compared, with prices and limits Six free GEO tools compared by price and limits, from Awesome GEO's 8 browser checks to Otterly's trial. For anyone testing AI visibility before paying. Free profile sites for AI assistants: 157 scored and ranked Awesome GEO scored 157 free platforms out of 100. GitHub and LinkedIn Articles lead at 98. See which of four AI crawlers each top-30 site allows. SEEN GEO checklist: 41 items across four layers SEEN is a four-layer GEO framework: Structure, Evidence, Entity, Notability. Score its 41 checklist items 0 or 1 and fix the weakest layer first. 17 generative engine optimization papers and their findings 17 research papers on generative engine optimization, each with its main finding, grouped by topic. Chosen from 32 on the Awesome GEO list. GEO researchers to follow, from the Awesome GEO reading list Researchers from Awesome GEO's 32-paper reading list, grouped by topic with what each paper found, plus practitioners named by four other expert lists. GEO vs SEO: what changes and what stays the same SEO ranks a page in a list of results; GEO gets a brand named or cited in an AI answer. Compares signals, measurement and click data, with sources. Get your brand mentioned by ChatGPT: 13 steps and a tally Let AI crawlers read your site, build linked profiles, add markup, then tally which assistants name you. Free tools, 13 steps. No mention is guaranteed. Platforms that block GPTBot and ClaudeBot, 11 November 2026 As of 11 November 2026, 45 of 157 free platforms block GPTBot, 43 block ClaudeBot and 39 block both. Per-platform table from robots.txt checks. Schema sameAs Quality: Which Profiles to Link What schema.org sameAs is for, which profiles make strong sameAs links, which to leave out, and how to sort them into tiers. Track ChatGPT and Perplexity traffic in GA4 with a regex Build a regex with Awesome GEO's free AI traffic filter, then use it in a GA4 exploration or custom channel group to show ChatGPT and Perplexity visits. Generative engine optimization (GEO): definition, evidence Generative engine optimization (GEO) is improving your visibility in AI-written answers. Covers its origin, four layers of work and the evidence.