Will AI tools find your site? Check these 8 things.

In 2026 Google published a dedicated guide for site owners on its AI features, last updated in July. If you have read a lot of advice about "GEO" or "AEO", the guide is a useful reality check. Its main message is that optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience.

It then rules out several popular tricks. In Google's words, you do not need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files, markup or Markdown to appear in Search. There is no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces, and no need to write in a special way for AI. Structured data is not required, and there is no special schema.org markup to add.

What does Google ask for instead? Its "AI features and your website" page says a page needs to be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet. Beyond that, it points to the basics: let crawlers in, link to your pages from other pages on your site, give visitors a good experience, keep important content as text, and use good images and video.

If you want the bigger picture of why clicks are changing, our earlier guide on getting cited by AI search covers it. This post is the practical website checklist.

Go through these in order. Most take minutes.

• Open your robots.txt and read itType yourdomain.com/robots.txt into a browser. Make sure it does not block the search bots listed in the next section. Google also notes that your CDN or hosting layer must not block crawlers either.
• Make sure the page is indexedSearch Console shows which pages Google has indexed. A page that is not indexed cannot appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
• Do not hide a page from snippets by accidentSettings such as nosnippet or noindex limit what Google shows. Check that none are set on pages you want quoted.
• Keep key text in the HTMLGoogle can process JavaScript. For other AI crawlers, the vendors say nothing, and one older analysis found they did not render it. Put your headline, answers and prices in the page your server sends.
• Link your pages togetherGoogle lists easy discovery through internal links as a best practice. Every important page should be reachable from another page.
• Write the page for peopleGoogle says trust is the most important part of its quality guidance. Show who wrote the page, add a byline where readers would expect one, and back claims with real examples and sources.
• Publish a sitemap with honest datesBing says it fully supports the sitemap protocol, wants the lastmod date to reflect the real time of the last content change, and ignores changefreq and priority.
• Tell search engines when you publishIndexNow lets you notify participating engines, including Bing, about new or changed pages instead of waiting days or weeks for a crawl. Keep your Google Business Profile and, for local firms, Bing Places up to date.

The big AI companies each run more than one bot, and they do different jobs. This matters because you may be happy for your pages to be found in a chat answer but not want them used to train a model. Here is what each company says.

So the simple rule: if you want to be found in AI answers, allow the search bots (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) and Googlebot. If you do not want your content used for training, you can disallow the training bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) and still stay findable. It is your choice, and the two goals are separate.

Plenty of advice online is about things that Google says do nothing. Save your time.

• llms.txt. This is a proposed Markdown file that summarizes your site for AI tools. Google says Search ignores such files, so they neither help nor harm. We found no statement from OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity that they use it for answers either. It is harmless to publish, but do not expect results from it.
• FAQ markup for rich results. Google deprecated the FAQ rich result, and it stopped appearing in Search on May 7, 2026. Keep writing question-and-answer sections for your readers, but the special display is gone.
• Chopping pages into tiny pieces. Google says there is no requirement to do this.
• Buying mentions. Google says seeking inauthentic mentions across the web is not as helpful as it might seem.

Structured data is still worth having for other reasons. Google still supports markup for things like your organization, articles, products, local businesses and breadcrumbs. Just do not expect it to be a switch for AI answers, and make sure it matches the text visitors can see.

You cannot manage what you cannot see, and the tools are getting better.

• Google Search Console. Google says traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is counted in the Performance report under the Web search type, mixed in with normal results.
• Bing Webmaster Tools. In February 2026 Microsoft launched an AI Performance report in public preview. It shows how often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and some partner services, with a sample of the queries behind them. Microsoft is clear that citation counts do not show placement, ranking or authority.
• Your own analytics. Check which referrers send visitors. Watch trends over months, not days.