MAKIN 
AI answers still start with a search.
ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews all fetch pages before they answer. If a crawler cannot reach your page, or the page says nothing specific, there is nothing to quote. Getting cited is mostly ordinary search work done carefully, plus a few switches that only matter for AI crawlers.
Answer one question per page, in the first lines.
Answer engines lift short, self-contained passages. A page that opens with a direct answer (what it costs, how long it takes, who it is for) gives them a passage to lift. A page that opens with a slogan gives them nothing, however good the design.
Say the same facts the same way everywhere.
Your business name, city, services and prices should read identically on every page and every profile. When the facts agree, an AI system can attach them to one business with confidence. When they drift, it hedges or picks someone else.
Let the right crawlers in.
Each AI company runs its own crawler, and robots.txt decides which ones may read your site. Blocking them by accident, often through a firewall setting or a copied robots file, is the most common reason a good page never shows up in AI answers.
Which crawlers matter, and what each one does
Search crawlers fetch pages so an assistant can cite them in an answer. Training crawlers collect text to train future models. They are separate, so you can allow one and refuse the other. A business that wants to be quoted should, at the very least, allow the search crawlers:
- OAI-SearchBot: ChatGPT search results; GPTBot is OpenAI’s separate training crawler
- Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User for Claude’s answers; ClaudeBot is Anthropic’s training crawler
- PerplexityBot for Perplexity’s answers
- Bingbot: Copilot uses Bing’s index, and a page Bing has not indexed is hard for any Bing-based assistant to find
- Googlebot: AI Overviews draw on Google’s ordinary search index; Google-Extended controls whether Google’s Gemini models may use your pages, and has no effect on Search
Make the page readable without JavaScript
Many AI crawlers read the HTML your server sends and do not run scripts. If your prices, service names or answers appear only after JavaScript runs, those crawlers see an empty template. Open your page with JavaScript switched off, or view the page source, and check the facts you want quoted are there as text.
Speed matters for the same reason: a crawler with a time limit gives up on a slow page. Static pages, or pages rendered on the server, are the safe choice for anything you want cited.
Structure that helps an answer engine
Write headings as the questions people ask, and put the answer in the paragraph directly under each one. Use a table when you compare options or prices, and a short list when the answer is a set of steps. Add structured data (schema.org markup) for your organisation, your services and their prices, your articles and your FAQs, and keep it in step with the visible text.
An llms.txt file, a plain-text map of your site at /llms.txt, is a newer convention some AI tools read. It costs little to publish, but treat it as a helpful extra rather than a ranking switch: no major search engine has said it uses the file to rank pages.
Tell the search engines when a page changes
Submit a sitemap in Google Search Console and in Bing Webmaster Tools, and keep its dates honest. IndexNow lets you tell Bing and several other engines the moment a page is published or updated, which shortens the wait before Bing-based assistants can see it. Google does not use IndexNow, so for Google the sitemap and Search Console’s URL inspection remain the tools.
What nobody can promise
No agency can promise that a particular assistant will quote you, because the AI companies decide what appears in their answers and change their systems often. What you can control is whether your pages are reachable, specific, consistent and fast. Measure the result by asking the assistants the questions your customers ask, every month, and recording which sources they cite.
If you want this done as part of a new site, our Marketing Site + SEO/GEO package starts at ₹40,000. The website development cost guide compares it with our other website packages.