I’ve spent well over two decades figuring out how Google reads a website. The last couple of those years I’ve been figuring out how an AI crawler reads one instead, and it’s a different question with a different answer. Unfortunately, most sites still aren’t built for it, leaving a lot of possibilities on the table.
This is the site I use to prove that out. Not a client’s site, where I’d have to talk in generalities and keep the specifics vague. Mine. So here’s exactly what I did, plain language, no theory I haven’t actually applied somewhere on these pages.
What Makes a Website AI Crawler Friendly
Google indexes pages. An AI crawler extracts passages. That’s the actual difference, and once you see it, it changes how you build everything downstream.
A traditional SEO checklist asks whether a page ranks. An AI-visibility checklist asks something narrower: if a system pulls one paragraph out of your page with zero surrounding context, does it still make sense on its own, and does it still sound like it came from someone who knows the subject. If an AI crawler can’t cleanly lift a piece of your content and understand it without the rest of the page propping it up, it tends to just skip you and cite whoever made that easy.
Every decision below came out of that one distinction.
Every Section Has to Stand on Its Own
I write in self-contained blocks now, not one flowing narrative where paragraph four only makes sense if you read paragraph two first. Each heading on this site answers one question completely, so an AI crawler can grab that single block and quote it without losing meaning.
You can see it most directly on my consulting page, where there’s a section naming over twenty different ranking and AI-visibility factors, each one defined short enough to quote whole. That wasn’t a design decision first. It was a content-chunking decision that happened to also look good once it was built.
What Generative Engine Optimization Actually Means
I get asked this a lot, so here’s the plain version (not the version that sounds impressive at a conference).
Search isn’t only Google’s ten blue ranking links anymore. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google’s own AI Overviews, they’re answering questions directly now, and they decide what to cite based on different signals than classic rankings have ever used. Generative Engine Optimization (AI GEO) is the practice of structuring a site so those systems can actually find it, trust it, and quote it correctly. It overlaps with regular SEO in places. It isn’t the same discipline. A page can rank fine in classic organic search and still be invisible to an AI system that can’t cleanly pull anything usable out of it. That’s the layer sitting underneath everything else in this post.
Schema, But Not Hardcoded
Structured data tells search engines and AI systems what a page actually is, not just what it says on the surface. I decided to build my site on a WordPress foundation which I have always been a fan of, especially for small and medium sized businesses , as they are plug and play and perfect to give their owners full control. I used to build many of these for clients over the years. So I build my Schema through RankMath (a free wordpress plugin) instead of hand-coding it into the theme, and I validate every new template before it goes live, not after.
That second part matters more than it sounds like it should. Schema is invisible until it’s broken, a theme update can quietly snap it and you’d never know from looking at the page. Building it through a tool that flags errors instead of PHP I’d have to remember to check by hand was a deliberate call, not a shortcut.
E-E-A-T Isn’t Just a Buzzword to an AI System
E-E-A-T, experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust, gets thrown around so often it’s started to sound like filler that’s not that big of a deal. though it’s very important. It’s the actual test both Google and AI systems run before deciding whether to believe what you wrote.
On my About page, I don’t say I’ve done a lot of site inspections. I say I’ve done 118, across more than a dozen regions, because a number an AI system can extract and cite is worth more than an adjective it has to interpret. Same logic on my Experience page, real years, real employers, real outcomes, nothing rounded up or softened into a vague claim. That’s not a style choice. It’s what gives a system something concrete to actually point to when it decides your page is a credible source instead of one more opinion on the internet.
Building Live, With No Staging Site
This entire site runs directly on production. No staging environment. Every theme change, every schema update, every layout tweak goes straight to the live URL the day I make it.
That’s a real tradeoff, not something I’d recommend as best practice, and I’ll be upfront about why I did it anyway, knowing its a NEW domain, and no one even knows it exists. I wanted the SEO decisions I make here tested under the same conditions a real client’s site runs under, cache layers included. Early in the build, before the real content was ready, I intentionally set the site to noindex so nothing half-finished got crawled. Once the actual pages were live, I turned that off, and it’s stayed off since.
The part worth mentioning is how I check whether a change actually took effect instead of just assuming it did. My host runs two caching layers stacked on top of each other, and they don’t always clear on the same schedule. More than once a page has looked wrong to a checking tool right after a deploy, and the fix wasn’t more code, it was a manual cache purge and a re-check against Google Search Console’s own Indexed Pages report, since that’s the one place that shows exactly what Google’s crawler actually saw and when. That’s the primary source. Everything else is downstream of it and can lag behind. I also implemented a free Caching plugin I like (WP Fastest Cache).
That’s the actual job most days. Not knowing every rule by heart. Knowing which source to trust when two tools disagree, and having a process that checks the real thing instead of assuming the first result is right. I’ve been called; An Overly Analytical, Overly Detailed Freak of Nature, ha! My Wife will attest to that poor thing. Though, i will say it is my super power owning a Travel Agency, and working in SEO & AI Search Visibility as a Strategist all these years, so I’ll own it.
What to Check on Your Own Site
If you’re wondering whether your own site reads clean to an AI crawler, start with three things before anything more advanced.
Pull your live Robots Meta tag, page by page, not just your sitemap. It only takes one page set to noindex to keep it out of search entirely, and it’s an easy setting to forget about once a site’s been live for a while.
Read your homepage with JavaScript turned off. If your core content disappears, could be an issue as an AI crawler that doesn’t render JS the way a browser does may never see it either.
Check whether your Google Search Console Indexed Pages report matches what you think is actually live. They drift more often than people expect, especially on cached hosting, and GSC’s own crawl data beats guessing every time.
None of that requires a tool purchase or a retainer. It requires actually looking.
I’ll keep documenting this build here as I go, the parts that worked and the parts I had to fix. If you want a second set of eyes on your own site’s structure, that’s what the audit on this site is for.