Websites in the age of AI: what has changed and what to do about it

Short answer: there is no "submit my site to ChatGPT" button. Models do not roam the internet looking for your company - they use search engine indexes and whatever can be understood from your site without guesswork. So visibility in AI starts from the same foundations as SEO, but it rewards different things: structure, specifics, and whether a robot is allowed to read the site at all.

What actually changed

For twenty years the game looked like this: a user types a phrase, gets ten links, clicks. Whoever ranked higher won.

Today it increasingly looks like this: a user asks a question in a full sentence, gets a single answer - with two or three sources in it. There are fewer clicks, because the answer is often enough. The goal shifts: it is no longer only about ranking high. It is about being the one the model quotes.

Hence the acronym AEO - optimising for answers rather than for search results alone.

Where AI gets its knowledge about companies

Three sources, in this order:

1. A search engine index. When searching, ChatGPT uses Bing's index, not Google's. That one sentence explains most of the disappointment: you can rank first in Google and not exist in ChatGPT's answers.
2. The models' own crawlers. GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and a dozen others walk sites on their own - provided you let them.
3. Mentions outside your site. A Google business profile, industry directories, articles, reviews. A model that sees the same company, the same address and the same phone number in several places treats it as real.

Point two surprises people most often: many providers block AI crawlers by default. Cloudflare can do it at the level of an entire domain, in two independent places at once. You can have an exemplary site that no model will ever read, because it is refused at the door.

What my own website taught me

Honestly, because this is the part the competition will not write: itama.pl did not exist in ChatGPT's search for many weeks, even though it ranked first in Google and Bing for its own name and technically had everything it needed - structured data, llms.txt, AI crawlers allowed in, correct canonical addresses.

The conclusion I drew, and apply with clients today:

Technical work helps AI understand your site.
It will not make AI find it in the first place.

A fresh domain needs external signals and simply time. So with every new deployment I do the full set of things that speed up discovery: submission to Bing Webmaster Tools (because ChatGPT does not read Google), notifying search engines about new addresses through IndexNow, a Google business profile with complete details, and a consistent spelling of the name, address and phone number everywhere the company appears.

And I tell clients plainly: visibility in AI does not appear within a week. Anyone promising otherwise is selling hope.

What we specifically do on NEO sites

• A dedicated page for every real customer need, instead of one "Services" page with a bullet list. A model quotes the page that answers one question, not the one that mentions ten things.
• The answer immediately under the heading. Two or three concrete sentences before the elaboration begins. That is exactly the fragment that ends up in an AI answer - this article is written that way too.
• Structured data (who this is, where they operate, what they do, which services and reviews they have) - so the machine does not have to guess from the layout.
• An llms.txt file - a table of contents for the site, written for language models.
• AI crawlers allowed in, with a check that they really get an answer rather than a block.
• An "AI bots" tab in the client panel - showing which models read the site, how often, and whether the trend is rising. It is the only way to stop debating AEO and simply measure it.

Where this is heading

Search traffic will fall while the value of a single visit rises - because the person arriving has already been pointed there by a model. In practice that means three things for a company:

1. A website stops being a brochure and becomes a source. Four pretty slides and a contact form are not enough - you need answers to the questions a customer asks before buying.
2. Content has to be yours and specific. Bulk-generated generalities are indistinguishable to a model from a thousand others - experience, numbers and real cases are not.
3. Your brand off the site starts to weigh as much as the site. A business profile, directories, mentions, reviews - that is what a model uses to conclude the company genuinely exists.

Want to know where your site stands? Write to me - I will run an AEO audit and show you two things: whether AI crawlers visit it at all, and what is blocking their understanding of the content. If it turns out a few small fixes are enough, I will say so plainly instead of selling you a new website.

Frequently asked questions

Is SEO becoming irrelevant? No. Models rely on search engine indexes, so the foundations are shared. AEO is a layer on top, not a replacement.

How do I check whether ChatGPT knows my company? Ask it in a full sentence, the way a customer would ("who in Gdynia does..."). No answer is a signal to check whether the site is in Bing's index and whether AI crawlers can reach it.

How long does it take? From a few weeks to a few months for a new domain. The technical part can be done immediately; the rest is time plus signals from outside the site.

Is adding llms.txt enough? No. It is one element. Without content that answers real questions, it is the table of contents of an empty book.