Bottom line: this sub is for making a business visible inside AI-written answers. Not rankings. Citations. If you post a number here, name the tool it came from, the date window, and what the number counts. That is the whole culture.

Who runs this and why you should know

I run this sub. I also run ryanlenk.com, where I sell GEO and AEO consulting. You should know that before you read another word I write here.

Three rules I hold myself to:

1. I do not post my services here. Not in threads, not in the wiki, not in DMs.
2. The wiki has no prices, no pitch, and no funnel in it.
3. When I link my own site, it is because the source lives there, and I will say so.

If I break one of those, say so in the comments. I will not remove the comment.

What this sub is for

An AI answer engine answers a question with written text instead of a list of links. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Google's AI answers are all AI answer engines. They write from sources they read and trust. When an engine uses your page as a source, that is a citation.

A citation is not a visit. The reader can finish the answer and never click. That is the trade this whole field runs on, and we talk about it honestly here.

Post here about:

• Getting cited by AI engines, and what actually moved
• What your measurement tools do and do not report
• Structured data, crawler access, entity data, answer pages
• Tests that failed. Those are worth more than wins with no method attached.

What this sub is not for

• Ranking-only SEO with no AI angle. Other subs do that better.
• "Rate my site" with no specific question.
• Screenshots of a score with no tool named.
• Vendor pitches. There will be a promo thread. Use it.

The one rule that matters: show the instrument

An instrument is the named tool that produced a number, plus the date window and the unit.

Bad: "We got 200 AI citations last month."

Good: "Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance report, July 1 to July 31, 200 page citations across the domain. Same window last month was 140. Nothing else changed except we unblocked GPTBot on July 3."

The second one can be argued with. That is the point. Citations, impressions, and clicks are three different facts and they do not add together.

Do this in the next 10 minutes

Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. Search the page for Disallow. Look at which user agent each one sits under. A user agent is the name a crawler gives when it asks for a page.

Look for these four:

• GPTBot (OpenAI)
• PerplexityBot (Perplexity)
• ClaudeBot (Anthropic)
• Google-Extended (Google)

If any of them is disallowed, that engine cannot read your site at all, and nothing else you do about AI visibility matters. Some website platforms set this as a privacy default and never tell the owner.

That is a five-minute fix and it is the highest-leverage one in this field.

The wiki

Seven pages, no numbers, no sales:

• Start Here, the whole path in order with time costs
• Glossary, every term defined in plain words
• GEO vs AEO vs SEO, what each earns you
• The 10-Minute Check, the full version of what you just did
• Measurement Stack, four free tools plus which engines you can actually measure
• Tools and Resources, everything free and open source worth your time

Link: r/GenerativeOptimizers Wiki

The wiki gets things wrong. When it does, say so in this thread. Give me the page name, the exact line, and the source that shows the correct version. Wrong lines get replaced.

First question for the thread

Run the robots.txt check above and tell us what you found. Blocked, clear, or something you did not expect.

If you found a block, say which platform you are on. That pattern is worth mapping.

Disclaimer: This post was written with AI assistance, I know that and it is completely fine in this subreddit. I'm not here to name and shame you, and no one else here will be either. Just make sure you cite your sources where available and put effort and thought into your posts.