Optimizing for AI Search

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) — optimizing content for generative AI systems: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) — optimizing for answer engines: Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot.

Both terms describe the same goal: making AI systems cite your website in their answers.

Three stages of answer generation:

1. Retrieval  →  2. Ranking  →  3. Generation
Finding            Ranking by      Generating answer
relevant           quality and     with source
documents          reliability     citations

Retrieval — the AI system finds potentially relevant pages. Helps: sitemap.xml, llms.txt, schema.org markup.

Ranking — quality assessment: E-E-A-T signals, topical authority, content structure, direct answers.

Generation — the model forms an answer, selecting fragments from top-N documents. Preference goes to content that’s easy to extract and cite.

AI models work better with structured text. Practical rules:

## What is llms.txt?           ← definition
### File Format                ← specifics
### Required Elements          ← details

Each H2 should be a self-contained answer to a specific question.

❌ Bad:

In recent years, there has been a growing trend toward using
various file formats for interacting with AI systems.
One such format is llms.txt, which...

✅ Good:

llms.txt is a Markdown file at the site root (/llms.txt).
Contains a structured list of pages with descriptions.
Helps LLMs understand site content without parsing HTML.

AI models extract data from tables more accurately than from prose:

| File | Size | Purpose |
|------|------|---------|
| llms.txt | 1-4K tokens | Index with links |
| llms-full.txt | 10-100K tokens | Full content |

Question-answer format is ready-made content for AI citation:

## FAQ

### Does my site need llms.txt?
If you have documentation, a blog, or a product site — yes.
Creation takes 15 minutes, no risks involved.

### Does llms.txt replace sitemap.xml?
No. sitemap.xml is a complete URL list. llms.txt is a curated
set of key pages with descriptions.

llms.txt is one layer in a multi-level strategy:

The file helps AI systems find and understand key content. It’s an entry point — a “table of contents” for machines.

Provide .md versions of pages. HTML contains navigation, ads, scripts — noise for LLMs. Markdown is clean content.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "TechArticle",
  "headline": "Creating llms.txt",
  "description": "Guide to creating llms.txt for your website",
  "author": {"@type": "Organization", "name": "Example"}
}
</script>

Deep topic coverage signals AI about your expertise. Content clusters (pillar + supporting pages) work better than scattered articles.

• Perplexity — check if your site is cited for relevant queries
• ChatGPT — ask a question about your topic, check sources in the answer
• Google Search Console — AI Overviews section (if available)
• Otterly.AI — specialized AI visibility monitoring tool

Sources:

• aeo.press — The State of llms.txt in 2026
• WebsCraft — llms.txt Guide for Web Developers 2026
• Bluehost — What is llms.txt?