Guides
Plain-language guides to how AI search works and what a site owner can check or change. Each one is dated and tied to the AI companies' own documentation, so you can see where every claim comes from.
The guides build on each other. Start with how AI search engines choose and cite sources for the mechanics, then work through the crawler and agent access checks, and read the measurement guide before drawing conclusions from any single answer. Longer essays on where machine-driven discovery is heading live in the research section.
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01
How AI search engines choose and cite sources
Where answer engines get their candidate pages, how one question becomes several searches, and why engines cite fewer pages than they read.
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02
Making a site readable to AI crawlers and agents
A provider-by-provider table of AI bots, how robots.txt groups apply, Google's separate controls, CDN bot settings, JavaScript rendering, browser agents, and llms.txt.
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03
Measuring AI search visibility
What Search Console's Generative AI report, Bing Webmaster Tools, analytics referrals, server logs, and prompt tracking can each show, and what none of them can.
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04
AI search glossary
Twenty short definitions of the terms that come up in AI search work, with links to the guides that cover them in more depth.