Does your site show up in ChatGPT? Make content AI-readable
AI tools read websites too. See what helps and what hurts your content's chances of being found and cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
Key takeaways
- Assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity consult websites to answer questions.
- Content that only appears after JavaScript runs, or that is blocked in robots.txt, can be invisible to them.
- Clear, well-organized text with structured data helps both Google and AI tools.
In this guide
More and more people ask an AI assistant directly instead of searching on Google: "what is the best physical therapy clinic near me?", "how do I clean white sneakers?". To answer, many of these tools read websites. If yours cannot be read, it simply does not make it into the conversation.
Nobody outside these companies knows exactly how each AI chooses the sources it cites, and it changes fast. But some practices clearly help, and almost all of them also improve your traditional SEO.
1. Do not block the crawlers by accident
AI companies use their own crawlers to read the web, such as GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot and Google-Extended (Google). Your site's robots.txt file says which crawlers may come in.
Some hosts and security plugins block these crawlers by default. If you want to appear in these answers, make sure they are allowed. If you would rather not appear, blocking them is your right: it is a business decision, not a mistake.
2. Make sure the text exists without JavaScript
Many modern sites build their content in the browser with JavaScript. People see everything normally, but not every crawler runs that code. To a crawler, the page can look empty.
A simple way to check: open the page, right-click and choose "View page source." If the main text does not appear there, some crawlers cannot see it either.
3. Write to be understood
What helps a person skim your text also helps an AI understand it:
- One topic per page, with a title that says exactly what it is about.
- Subheadings that work as questions and answers ("How much does it cost?", "Are you open on Saturdays?").
- Direct answers at the start of each section, with details afterward.
- Concrete facts: prices, address, hours, timelines. Vague information is rarely cited.
4. Use structured data
Structured data is markup, invisible to visitors, that tells machines: "this is a business," "this is a product and costs this much," "this is a frequently asked question." The most widely used standard is schema.org, and many WordPress SEO plugins, such as Yoast and Rank Math, already generate this markup. Our JSON-LD and Schema.org guide has ready-made examples.
5. Speed still matters
Crawlers are in a hurry too. Pages that take too long or return errors may be read halfway, or not at all. Everything that makes your site fast for people helps here as well.
What about llms.txt?
You may have heard of llms.txt, a file meant to summarize your site for AI tools. It is a proposal, not an official standard, and there is no guarantee the major tools use it. It can be a complement, but it does not replace the practices above.
How to see where you stand
The Teste de Performance report includes an AI visibility analysis: it checks whether the main crawlers can access the page and whether the content is readable to them. It is a good starting point to know what to fix first.