There's a version of this where you've done everything right — good site, real content, customers who love you — and the AI tools still can't see you at all. Not because your content's bad. Because somewhere, a switch is flipped the wrong way, and the robots are bouncing off a locked door they don't bother knocking on twice.
It's more common than it should be. A chunk of websites are quietly blocking the exact crawlers they'd want reading them, and the owners have no idea. You wouldn't either. Nobody sends you a notice that says “by the way, you're invisible to ChatGPT now.”
The three ways you disappear by accident
Here's the thing — none of these are about your writing or your offers. They're plumbing. Boring, invisible plumbing that decides whether the AI ever gets to read a single word you wrote.
One: you're telling the bots to go away. There's a little file on most websites (it's called robots.txt) that tells automated visitors what they're allowed to look at. Some sites are set, sometimes by default, to turn away the AI crawlers specifically. Same goes for some security and speed services like Cloudflare — they'll block AI bots out of the box unless someone says otherwise. You can be politely showing the robots the door without ever deciding to.
Two: your site looks blank to them. A lot of modern sites are built so the content loads after the page does, using JavaScript. Humans don't notice. But some AI crawlers can't wait around for that — they show up, see an empty page, and leave. You've got a gorgeous site full of content and the bot saw a white rectangle.
Three: they're sending people to dead ends on your site. AI tools invent links that don't exist almost three times as often as Google does. Someone reads “you can find it at yoursite.com/whatever,” clicks, and hits a 404 because that page was never real. That's a person who wanted you, standing at a locked door. You can catch those and redirect them — found money, if you're watching for it.
You don't have to fix this yourself
I want to be straight with you: some of this is “ask whoever built your site” territory. That's fine. The point isn't that you become the person who edits robots.txt. The point is knowing the question to ask.
So here's the question. Send it to your web person, word for word:
“Are we blocking any AI crawlers in robots.txt or Cloudflare, and does our site render its content without JavaScript?”
If they answer it cleanly, great — you've just checked the single highest-payoff thing on the whole list, because these are usually one-and-done fixes. If they go quiet, or ask what you mean, that's its own answer. And it's probably the moment to bring in someone who lives in this stuff.
What gets me about this one is how unfair it feels. You can do all the visible work — the content, the clarity, the showing-up — and still be sunk by a setting you never knew existed. That's not a you problem. That's a nobody-explained-it problem. Which is most of my job, honestly: explaining the thing that was supposedly obvious and somehow never was.
Want someone to just check all of this for you and hand you the list? That's the AEO Readiness Translation.