Can ChatGPT and Claude Find Your App? A Guide to AEO
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) decides whether AI assistants can crawl, understand, and cite your site. Here is how to check and fix your AI visibility.
By Daniel A · Kraftwire Software
· 7 min readKey Takeaway
Search is splitting in two. Half your future traffic will still come from Google's blue links. The other half comes from AI assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — answering questions directly and citing a handful of sources. **Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)** is how you make sure your app is one of those sources. And most vibe-coded apps accidentally block it.
What AEO actually is
AEO is the practice of making your content accessible to and quotable by AI answer engines. It overlaps with SEO but has its own rules:
**Crawler access.** Each AI company runs its own bot — GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended and more. If your `robots.txt` blocks them, you are invisible to that engine.
**Machine-readable content.** Answer engines favor server-rendered text, structured data (JSON-LD), and clear headings over content that only appears after JavaScript runs.
**A pointer file.** The emerging `llms.txt` standard lets you hand AI models a map of your most important pages.
The trap most AI-built apps fall into
Two failure modes are extremely common in apps built with Lovable, Bolt, v0, or Cursor:
**A blanket `Disallow: /` or an over-eager bot block.** Some starter templates and security plugins block "AI scrapers" by default. That also blocks the engines you *want* citing you.
**A JavaScript-only shell.** If your homepage returns an empty `<div id="root">` and paints content client-side, many crawlers see nothing. Google renders JS; several AI crawlers do not.
The result: you rank fine in a normal browser and are completely absent when someone asks ChatGPT "what's a good tool for X?"
The AEO checklist
Run through these in order of impact:
**Allow the AI crawlers you want.** In `robots.txt`, make sure GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended are not disallowed from `/`.
**Serve real HTML.** Ensure your key pages return meaningful text in the initial response, not just an app shell. Pre-rendering or SSR for marketing/content pages is enough.
**Add `llms.txt`.** Put a plain-text file at `/llms.txt` listing your product, what it does, and links to your best pages.
**Ship structured data.** Add JSON-LD for `Organization`, `SoftwareApplication`, and `FAQPage`. Answer engines lean on schema to understand and quote you.
**Use FAQ / Q&A blocks.** Content phrased as questions and answers is disproportionately surfaced by answer engines.
**Declare your sitemap** in `robots.txt` so crawlers can find everything.
How to check your AI visibility in 30 seconds
You do not have to audit this by hand. SimplyScan's free [AI Visibility Checker](/tools/ai-visibility) reads your `robots.txt` and reports, per engine, whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and others can crawl you — then checks your `llms.txt`, structured data, and whether your content is server-rendered. You get a grade and a fix list, no signup required.
Bottom line
AEO is where SEO was fifteen years ago: a small, well-understood set of fixes that most people have not done yet. Allow the right crawlers, serve real HTML, add `llms.txt` and schema, and you put your app in the running to be the answer — not just a link on page two.