A prospect who used to type a question into Google now asks an assistant instead. They get a synthesized paragraph and two or three citations. Either your company is one of those citations, or you were never in the conversation — and unlike a search results page, there's no second page to scroll to.
Most advice about this collapses into "do good SEO." That's not wrong, but it's incomplete. Answer engines don't work like a ranked list. They retrieve chunks of text, assemble an answer, and cite the sources they leaned on. Optimizing for that requires thinking about your content differently: not as pages that rank, but as passages that get pulled.
Retrieval happens at the passage level
When a model builds an answer, it isn't reading your homepage top to bottom. It's pulling a few hundred words that seem to address the question and using them in isolation. That has a practical consequence: any passage that only makes sense in the context of the paragraphs around it is a passage that can't be used.
So stop writing sentences like "As mentioned above, this typically takes six to eight weeks." Write "An Odoo inventory module rollout for a single-warehouse distributor typically takes six to eight weeks." Name the subject. Name the qualifier. Assume the sentence will be read by someone who has seen nothing else on your site.
This is the same discipline good technical documentation has always required, and it happens to make your pages easier for humans to skim too.
Check whether the bots can reach you at all
Before any of this matters, confirm you're actually accessible. Several things commonly block AI crawlers without anyone intending to:
- `robots.txt` rules that disallow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended — sometimes added years ago by a developer who saw a blog post about AI scraping
- Bot protection at the CDN or WAF layer that challenges unfamiliar user agents
- Content rendered entirely client-side, so the raw HTML is an empty shell
- Key facts locked inside PDFs, images, or embedded tools rather than plain text
Pull your server logs and look for those crawler user agents. If you don't see them, that's your first problem, and it's usually a configuration fix rather than a content project.
Separately, decide deliberately whether you want to be indexed by these systems. Some businesses have real reasons to opt out. Most mid-market companies selling services do not — being uncitable is not a competitive advantage.
Put every important fact somewhere canonical
Ask yourself where, exactly, on your site a machine could learn what industries you serve, what your implementation process looks like, what systems you integrate with, or where you operate. If the answer is "it's implied across a few case studies and a slide deck," you've left the model to guess.
Build pages that state these things plainly. A services page that lists actual platforms by name. A process page that walks through phases in order. An FAQ that answers the questions your sales team fields every week, in the customer's own words rather than your internal vocabulary.
Consistency matters as much as presence. If your company name, service descriptions, and location appear three different ways across your site, LinkedIn, and directory listings, you've made yourself harder to identify as a single entity. Structured data markup helps here — organization, service, and FAQ schema give machines an unambiguous version of what your prose says loosely.
Write the question, then answer it in the first two sentences
The format that gets retrieved is boringly simple: a heading phrased the way someone would ask, followed immediately by a direct answer, followed by the nuance.
Most marketing pages do the opposite. They build up. They set context. They arrive at the point in paragraph four, after establishing credibility. That structure works in a pitch meeting and fails completely in retrieval, because the passage that gets pulled is the one that contains the answer — and if that's buried, a competitor's clearer page wins the citation.
Lead with the answer. You can still be nuanced underneath it.
How to tell if it's working
Traditional rank tracking won't show you this. A few things will: referral traffic from assistant domains in your analytics, growth in branded and long-tail queries as people verify what an AI told them, crawler hits in your logs, and the simplest test of all — periodically asking the major assistants the questions your buyers ask, and reading what comes back. Note whether you're mentioned, whether the description is accurate, and where the wrong information came from.
That last part matters. When an assistant describes your business incorrectly, there is almost always a stale page, an old directory listing, or an ambiguous sentence feeding it.
Where this fits
This isn't a replacement for your existing search work — the same fundamentals of fast, well-structured, genuinely useful pages underpin both. It's a shift in emphasis toward clarity, self-contained passages, and facts stated in one authoritative place.
If you're not sure whether AI crawlers can reach your site, or what assistants currently say when someone asks about your category, that's a concrete audit with a concrete output. We do this work alongside site performance, content architecture, and the systems behind your lead flow. Reach out and we'll take a look at yours.