Nobody can make an AI recommend you, and anyone selling that is selling nothing. What you can do is let the crawlers in, put your facts in plain text, publish something only you could say, and get real people talking about you. Google says this work is still just SEO. Expect months, not days.
Why we read all this
We’re a new company with a name people mix up. Before we fixed our site, we put five plain questions about ourselves, such as “What is Luven AI?”, through one AI tool’s web search, three times each. It found nothing about us in 15 of 15 runs and offered companies with similar names instead. So we read what each company publishes about how this works, and changed our site to match. We have no results to show yet, and we’ll add them here when we do.
What Google says
Google’s May 2026 guide is the clearest thing any of these companies has written. Its AI Overviews and AI Mode pull from the normal search index, using the normal ranking systems. Work sold as “AEO” or “GEO” is, from its side, “and thus still SEO”. In practice:
- A page has to be indexed and able to show a snippet. There are no additional requirements. Your site must also be set to Include in Search Console’s generative AI control. That’s the default, but it takes a minute to look.
- The thing it says matters most is content that isn’t a commodity. Its own contrast: a “tips for first-time buyers” list could come from anyone, while a first-hand account of a decision you made and what it cost could only come from you.
- A single question gets answered by a spread of related searches, which it calls query fan-out. Writing a page for each of those variations to game it counts as scaled content abuse.
- Being mentioned in blogs, videos and forums can show up in its answers, but chasing fake mentions won’t help.
- For stores and local businesses, it points to Merchant Center and Business Profiles as the way into its answers.
What you can stop worrying about
| What you’ll hear | What the source says |
|---|---|
| You need an llms.txt file | Google Search ignores it, and says it neither helps nor harms. We have one anyway, for other systems. It took minutes. We’ve seen no evidence it does anything |
| You need special AI schema | Google says no special schema.org markup is required for its AI features. Normal markup is still worth having for rich results, though Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026 |
| Cut your content into small chunks | Google says there’s no such requirement and no ideal page length |
| Rewrite everything for AI, and cover every long-tail phrase | Google says its systems understand synonyms and meaning, so you don’t need to |
| Publish hundreds of question pages | That’s the abuse named above, and Google says more pages doesn’t make a site better |
| Buy this AI visibility score | Google says no outside tool can see its internal ranking or AI systems. These results also change from run to run, so a single score tells you little |
Which crawler does what
Most companies run separate crawlers for search and for model training, so you can say yes to one and no to the other. This is the part many people get wrong: blocking everything to protect your work can also take you out of the answers.
| Company | Puts you in its answers | Trains its models | Fetches when someone asks |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | OAI-SearchBot | GPTBot | ChatGPT-User |
| Anthropic | Claude-SearchBot | ClaudeBot | Claude-User |
| Perplexity | PerplexityBot | It says this bot isn’t used for training | Perplexity-User |
| Apple | Applebot, for Spotlight, Siri and Safari | Say no with Applebot-Extended | Not listed |
| Googlebot, plus the Search Console control | Say no with Google-Extended | Not listed | |
| Microsoft | Bing’s index, which feeds Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries | We didn’t find a separate control | Not listed |
Check your own site in ten minutes
- Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. Look for “Disallow: /” under * or any name in the table above. A missing file is fine.
- Check your host and security settings. Cloudflare said in July 2025 it was changing its default to block AI crawlers, so if your site sits behind it, look at that setting. A robots.txt that says yes can’t help if the host says no.
- Right-click a page, choose View Page Source, and search for a sentence you can see on the page. If it’s missing, the words only appear after JavaScript runs. Google can process JavaScript. We found nothing promising the same from the others, so don’t rely on it.
- Ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity to read one of your pages by its full address and tell you who runs the business. If one can’t, something is blocking it.
- Put your facts in one plain place: what you do, where, who runs it, what it costs. Assistants repeat what they find, so a stale price on an old page gets repeated too.
- Claim your listing if you have a real place customers visit. Google Business Profile and Apple Business are both free. Online-only businesses aren’t eligible for the Google one, and we didn’t make one for ourselves.
If people confuse you with someone else
This was our real problem. A university institute, an app and a few other companies have names close to ours. Here’s what we did, and we can’t yet say it worked. We wrote “Lou by Luven AI” everywhere, not just “Lou”. We added a short company page that names who runs it and where, and says plainly which similar names we aren’t. We removed our old pages, which described a different business, and pointed their addresses at the new ones. And once our real accounts are set up, we’ll link them from the site’s data, so a machine can tell this Luven from that one.
Being talked about still counts most
We can’t fix this one from our own site, and it may matter more than everything above. Assistants lean on what other people write. How much, and where, is unclear: studies of what they cite conflict, and most are run by vendors. One says G2 got no ChatGPT citations, and another summary puts it at 6.7%. We wouldn’t plan around either. Do something people want to write about, ask customers for honest reviews, and answer questions in public under your own name. Don’t buy any of it.
How to know if it’s working
- By hand, once a month, ask each assistant the same ten questions in a new chat and write down what it said, who it named and what it linked. Answers vary from run to run, so only trust a change that holds for two months.
- Search Console’s generative AI report shows impressions, and may not appear at low volume.
- Bing’s AI Performance report shows how often you’re cited in Copilot and Bing’s summaries.
- Ask new customers how they found you. It’s still the best number you’ll get.
How long it takes
Longer than anyone selling this will tell you. A new site’s facts can be corrected within weeks of being recrawled. Getting found by strangers is slower: Ahrefs found 1.74% of new pages reached the top 10 within a year, or 6.11% in its fairer sample. Ahrefs sells SEO tools, so weigh that, but we’ve seen nothing more cheerful. We’re treating this as a second-year channel for ourselves.
We make Lou by Luven AI, a video tool that isn’t open yet, so this isn’t what we sell. We wrote it because we had to learn it, and most of what’s online is written by people selling the answer.
How we write these: with AI help, from the sources we link, with dates. Counts marked as ours were made by an AI reader with no second check. If something’s wrong, email everest@luven.ai and we’ll fix it and say so.
