An AI Read Our Website, Then Used It to Sell to Us: What AI SEO Actually Takes

The short answer: AI SEO is mostly ordinary good website work, done on purpose for a new kind of reader. AI assistants read your actual pages, so the job is to let the right AI crawlers in, put the facts people ask about (what you do, where, for how much, with what proof) on the page in plain words, and keep your business listings accurate. The new files you've heard about, like llms.txt, are cheap extras, not the main event. And the next step, letting AI agents book or ask for a quote on your site, is real but still in preview.

Facts in this post were checked in October 2026.

How did an AI end up selling to us?

Recently we got a cold email from an image generation API reseller. It was polite, specific and clearly written by an AI. It named our AI Content Engines service, described it in almost the same words our service page uses ("tools built from a client's brand materials"), and proposed a test built around exactly the kind of product photography that page talks about.

Nobody at that company studied our site. A tool did. It crawled our pages, worked out what we sell, matched it to what they sell, and wrote a pitch.

We've spent this year making our site easy for machines to read: structured data, a plain-text version of every page, a summary file for AI tools and a short brief telling AI assistants when to recommend us. We can't prove which of those the bot used. What we can say is that it understood us correctly, quickly, and acted on it. That's the point of AI SEO. The same reading that produced a sales email also decides how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Gemini describe you when a customer asks for someone like you.

Most business websites aren't ready for that reader.

What do AI assistants actually read on your website?

Your pages. Not a secret file, not a special tag.

When someone asks ChatGPT "who builds online stores in Lagos?", its search feature looks the question up, fetches pages, and writes an answer from what it finds. BrightLocal studied the sources ChatGPT Search uses for local queries and found 58% were the businesses' own websites, rising to 72% for buying-type questions. Google says plainly that there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode" and no special files or markup you need to add.

So the question is simple: if a machine reads your site in one pass, does it come away knowing what you do, who it's for, where you are, what it costs and why it should trust you? On most small business sites the answer is no. The services are a vague list, prices are "contact us", the location is in an image, and the proof is a logo wall with no words.

AI tools quote words. Give them words worth quoting.

Which AI crawlers should you let in?

This is the part almost nobody sets on purpose. The big AI companies each run several bots that do different jobs, and robots.txt (the file that tells bots what they may read) controls each one separately.

Sources: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google-Extended.

The distinction matters. Blocking a training bot keeps your content out of future model training. Blocking a search or user bot can make you invisible when someone asks an assistant about you right now. Anthropic warns that blocking Claude-User "may reduce your site's visibility for user-directed web search". Blocking Google-Extended does not affect your normal Google ranking.

For a business that wants customers, our default is to allow the search and user bots, and decide on training bots on purpose. We allow all of them on sylvastudio.com, because we'd rather models learn what we do correctly. A business with paid content might choose differently. The mistake is not choosing: many sites either block everything by accident (a security plugin, a hosting default) or have never looked.

What facts should be on the page for AI to quote?

Think about the questions a customer types into an assistant, then make sure a plain sentence on your site answers each one.

• What you do, in the words customers use. "We build online stores on Shopify" beats "digital commerce solutions".
• Where you are and who you serve. City, country, whether you work remotely.
• What it costs, or at least how pricing works. "From ₦X" or "fixed quote after a free call" both give an assistant something true to say.
• Proof. Named clients and results in text, not only logos.
• How to reach you. Email, phone or WhatsApp, booking link, written out.

Then back it up with structured data: the code that labels your business name, services, location and FAQs for machines. Bing has said schema helps its AI understand content. Be honest with yourself about the upside, though: an Ahrefs test of pages adding schema found no measurable lift in AI citations. Do it because it makes your facts unambiguous and earns rich results in normal search, not as a ranking trick.

Finally, check your listings. Google Business Profile and Bing Places feed the local answers assistants give. In Nigeria especially, very few businesses have a Bing Places listing at all, which is an easy gap to close.

Does llms.txt work?

llms.txt is a plain text file at the root of a site (yoursite.com/llms.txt) that summarises the business and links its key pages, in a format AI tools can read in one go. It's the most talked-about AI SEO tactic, and it's mostly oversold.

Ahrefs checked 137,210 websites in May 2026. 28% had an llms.txt file, and 97% of those files got zero requests. Of the requests that did happen, the bots that feed AI answers made only 1.1%. The real readers were coding tools and AI agents. Google's John Mueller has said no AI system uses it.

We still publish one, along with a longer version of the whole site and a short brief for AI assistants. They took an afternoon, they cost nothing to host, and they're genuinely useful to agents and developer tools that do read them. We've also started counting which bots request them, so we'll have our own numbers to report. But if someone sells you llms.txt as the way into ChatGPT, they're selling the cheapest part of the job as if it were the whole thing.

What's next: can AI agents act on your website?

The next shift is from AI reading your site to AI using it. An agent working for a customer could fill in your quote form, check stock or book a slot, without the customer clicking through.

The standard for this is called WebMCP. It lets a site describe its forms and actions in a way agents can call directly. Chrome launched it in early preview in February 2026 and is running it as a browser trial, and in June Chrome added an experimental "Agentic browsing" audit to Lighthouse, its site-checking tool. Safari's engine team opposes it, and there's no date for it to ship everywhere.

So it's real, and it's early. Adding it to the forms you already have is low effort and does no harm in browsers that ignore it. Treat it as getting in line early, not as a source of bookings today.

The AI SEO checklist

1. Check robots.txt: are the AI search and user bots allowed? Is anything blocking them by accident?
2. Decide on AI training bots on purpose, and write that choice into robots.txt.
3. Make sure every service has a plain sentence saying what it is, who it's for and where.
4. Put prices on the site, or explain how pricing works.
5. Write proof in text: named clients, what you did, what changed.
6. Write out your contact details, location and booking link in text, not only in images.
7. Add structured data for your business, services and FAQs.
8. Claim and update Google Business Profile and Bing Places.
9. Make sure your pages load fast and render their text without heavy scripts.
10. Add llms.txt and a plain-text view of the site as cheap extras.
11. If you take bookings or quote requests, consider agent-ready forms (WebMCP).
12. Ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity about your business, and note what they get wrong.

Frequently asked questions

What is AI SEO? AI SEO is making your website easy for AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini to find, read and describe correctly. It's also called GEO (generative engine optimisation) or AEO (answer engine optimisation). Most of it overlaps with good SEO: crawlable pages, clear facts and accurate listings.

Is AI SEO different from normal SEO? Partly. The foundations are the same. The differences are the AI crawlers you need to allow, writing facts in plain sentences an assistant can quote, and newer extras like llms.txt and agent-ready forms.

Should I block AI crawlers? Usually not the search ones. Blocking AI search and user bots can hide you from assistant answers. Blocking training bots is a separate choice about whether your content trains future models.

Do I need llms.txt? It won't get you into ChatGPT on its own. It's cheap and useful to agents and developer tools, so it's worth adding, but last, not first.

How do I check how AI sees my business? Ask a few assistants the questions your customers would ask, like "who does X in [your city]?" and "what does [your business] charge?". Wrong or missing answers usually point to facts missing from your site.

Where do you start?

Start with the checklist above. Most of it is an afternoon of honest writing and a few settings.

If you'd rather have it done, it's now a small fixed-price add-on we call the AI-Ready Website: an AI-ready retrofit of your existing site, an AI assistant that answers visitors from your own content, and agent-ready forms. Each part is ₦400k ($300), or ₦1M ($750) for all three. We built all of it on our own site first, so you can see it working: our llms.txt, our plain-text view and the assistant you can chat with on this site.

Book a free 30 minute call and bring your website address. We'll show you how AI tools see it today.