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The BrandKnown blog
How search and AI assistants decide who you are — schema, crawler access, llms.txt, citations — written the way we'd explain it to a friend, with the awkward parts left in.
Latest · AEO
What an AI search readiness score actually measures
A readiness score is a website checklist, not a citation forecast. Here is what goes into it, what a 78 means, and what it will never tell you.
September 12, 2026 · Read it →
AEO
Your H1 is part of your entity record
Homepage H1, schema name, and title tag should agree. Here is a three-field consistency check you can finish in five minutes.
August 26, 2026
How brands get cited in Perplexity answers
Perplexity leans on live retrieval and visible citations. Access, clear identity, and citable third-party pages — in that order.
August 17, 2026
Why ChatGPT names some brands and skips yours
Training memory, browsing retrieval, and entity resolution — the three reasons you are missing, and which ones you can fix.
August 16, 2026
Gemini, AI Overviews, and what publishers can actually control
Pew numbers on AI Overview clicks, plus the on-site work that still matters when the summary keeps the user on Google.
August 15, 2026
Multi-brand companies: keeping entities separate
Parent and product brands need distinct names, URLs, and schema. How to avoid one blob that confuses every assistant.
July 31, 2026
E-E-A-T for answer engines: which experience signals travel
Experience and trust still matter when the reader is a model. What to put on-page, what to earn off-site, and what is theater.
July 25, 2026
Pricing page clarity so AI does not invent your plans
Ambiguous pricing pages get hallucinated. Plain plan names, numbers, and exclusions — a rewrite pattern.
July 19, 2026
Multilingual sites and entity consistency across languages
One company, many languages — hreflang, translated names, and schema that does not invent a second organization.
July 16, 2026
What answer engine optimization actually is
AEO is not SEO with a new hat. It is the work of making one machine-readable claim about who you are, in the places assistants look before they answer.
August 28, 2026
SEO vs AEO: what carries over, and what does not
Most of your SEO work still counts. A few habits — keyword density, thin location pages, link volume for its own sake — do nothing for an answer engine.
August 25, 2026
Entity SEO: one brand name, one entity
Machines do not read your brand as a story. They read it as a record with a name, a URL, a logo and a set of profiles — and every inconsistency splits that record in two.
August 21, 2026
llms.txt: what it is, and what it is not
A hint file in the llmstxt.org shape, worth twenty minutes of your time. It is not a ranking lever, and anyone selling it as one is selling you something.
July 28, 2026
Writing an About page a machine can read
Who you are, what you do, who you serve — in the first two hundred words, in plain sentences, with no adjectives doing the work of facts.
July 24, 2026
How AI assistants decide which brands to name
An honest account of what goes into a shortlist — training data, live retrieval, and the third-party pages that get cited — and where you can actually intervene.
July 17, 2026
Measuring AI visibility without fooling yourself
Hit rate, competitor slots and cited sources are the three numbers worth tracking. Here is how to read each one, and how much a single run really tells you.
July 14, 2026
Brand name mismatch is the quiet killer
Your title tag says one name, your schema another, your LinkedIn a third. To a machine that is three companies, none of them well described.
June 30, 2026
Schema
FAQ schema that helps answer engines (and when it does not)
FAQPage markup is useful when the questions are real. It is noise when you invent twenty FAQs nobody asked.
September 10, 2026
HowTo schema: when step markup is worth the effort
HowTo JSON-LD earns its keep on true procedural pages. Here is the field list, a working example, and when to skip it.
September 9, 2026
Product schema for SaaS: the fields AI actually reads
Name, description, brand, and offers — a practical Product block for software companies without fake ratings.
September 8, 2026
Article schema for blog posts that get cited
BlogPosting fields that help machines attribute authorship and freshness, plus the mistakes that void the block.
September 7, 2026
Breadcrumb schema and how assistants read site structure
BreadcrumbList is small, cheap, and clarifies hierarchy. Here is a copy-ready example and where it belongs.
September 6, 2026
Personal brand vs company entity in schema
Person and Organization are different types. When founders should appear as Person, and how to link them without merging identities.
July 30, 2026
Organization schema, field by field
A working guide to the JSON-LD block that tells a crawler what your company is called, where it lives, and which profiles belong to it.
August 18, 2026
Organization or LocalBusiness? Picking the right @type
The wrong type is worse than a missing one. Here is the rule we use, why an address and a phone number change the answer, and what NAP mismatch costs you.
August 14, 2026
sameAs: the profile links that hold your entity together
sameAs is how you tell a machine that the LinkedIn page, the Crunchbase record and the Wikidata item are all the same company as your homepage.
August 11, 2026
AI crawlers
A robots.txt template for AI search in 2026
A commented template that separates training crawlers from answer crawlers, with a decision table for each bot.
September 5, 2026
ChatGPT-User vs GPTBot: which one to allow
One fetches for live answers; one trains models. Confusing them is how teams block the bot they meant to welcome.
September 4, 2026
How to allow PerplexityBot without opening the floodgates
Perplexity citations need fetch access. Here is the user-agent, the robots rule, and the WAF checks that still block you.
September 3, 2026
Google-Extended: what blocking it does and does not do
Google-Extended is about Gemini training, not Search crawling. Blocking it is a real choice — just know which door you closed.
September 2, 2026
Cloudflare Bot Fight Mode vs the AI crawlers you want
Bot Fight Mode will 403 the agents your robots.txt just allowed. How to tell, and how to allowlist without disabling protection.
September 1, 2026
How to fix 403 errors for AI bots, step by step
Confirm the 403, find whether robots or WAF is lying, allowlist the agent, re-test with curl. A numbered path.
August 6, 2026
How to allowlist AI user agents in your WAF
Cloudflare, AWS WAF, and generic bot scores — patterns that let answer crawlers through without opening every scanner on earth.
August 5, 2026
Every AI crawler in your robots.txt, explained
GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, CCBot — what each one is for and what blocking it costs.
August 7, 2026
Should you block AI crawlers?
There is a real answer, and it is not the same for every bot. Split them into training crawlers and answer crawlers, then decide once for each group.
August 4, 2026
When your WAF blocks the bots you wanted
A 403 from Cloudflare beats a robots.txt rule every time. How to tell a bot-management block from a crawler problem, and how to allow the agents you chose.
June 23, 2026
SEO
Serving AI crawlers on Next.js and Vercel
SSR, static HTML, and middleware gotchas that make a Next site look empty to non-JS crawlers.
August 31, 2026
SSR vs CSR for AEO: a practical decision table
If your brand name only appears after hydration, AI never saw it. When to SSR, when to prerender, when a thin static shell is enough.
August 30, 2026
Meta descriptions that assistants actually reuse
Write the description as a definition, not a pitch. Length, voice, and a before/after table.
August 29, 2026
Title tags for entity clarity, not just click-through rate
Your title tag is one of the three places a machine learns your name. Clever marketing titles that drop the brand cost you entity clarity.
August 27, 2026
XML sitemaps still matter for AI discovery
Fresh lastmod, real URLs, no soft 404s — a sitemap checklist that helps humans and machines find the pages worth citing.
August 3, 2026
Canonical tags and the one-URL problem for entities
www vs apex, trailing slashes, and parameter URLs that split your entity across four addresses.
August 2, 2026
Soft 404s that confuse AI crawlers
A 200 with "page not found" text is worse than a real 404. How to find them and what status to return instead.
August 1, 2026
Dates, changelogs, and freshness signals for AI
dateModified that lies is worse than no date. When to bump dates, when to changelog, and how schema should reflect reality.
July 18, 2026
Your JavaScript site may be invisible to AI crawlers
AI crawlers generally do not execute JavaScript. If your name, description and schema only appear after hydration, they were never there at all.
July 21, 2026
Playbooks
How to run an AEO audit in one afternoon
Access, identity, evidence, then measurement — a four-hour sequence with a table for what to capture and what to ignore.
September 11, 2026
How to track AI referral traffic in GA4
Channel groups, referral exclusions, and a practical table of AI referrers worth watching — without over-reading small samples.
August 12, 2026
Measuring branded search lift after AI answers
Zero-click answers still move branded demand. How to watch Search Console for the lag without inventing causation.
August 10, 2026
An agency AEO workflow for ten client sites a month
Scan, triage, hand off fixes, re-scan — a repeatable loop sized for a $49/mo agency seat and a real calendar.
August 9, 2026
What to put in a client AEO report (and what to leave out)
Score, access findings, identity gaps, evidence gaps, and next steps — a report template that does not promise rankings.
August 8, 2026
Writing content briefs for AEO, not just SEO
Brief for the answer shape: definition, steps, table, sources. A template your writers can follow without producing fluff.
July 22, 2026
Comparison pages assistants recommend from
Honest comparison structure beats affiliate sludge. Sections, tables, and the disclosure rules that keep trust intact.
July 20, 2026
Ecommerce AEO checklist: products, merchants, and bots
Product availability, Merchant listings, crawler access, and review policy — a checklist for stores that want to be named.
July 15, 2026
AEO for local service businesses
LocalBusiness schema, GBP, NAP, and service-area pages that do not spam. A weekend plan for a plumber, clinic, or shop.
July 13, 2026
Why you re-scan after fixes (and what a re-scan can prove)
A passing re-scan proves the website check changed. It does not prove more citations. How to use both numbers without fooling yourself.
July 12, 2026
What to steal from a competitor's entity setup
A rival taking your shortlist slot usually has three or four specific things you do not. Here is how to find them by reading their public markup.
June 26, 2026
A 30-day AEO plan for a team of one
Four weeks, an hour or two a week, in dependency order: access first, then identity, then evidence, then measurement.
June 19, 2026
Reading about it is slower than checking
A scan names the specific thing that is wrong on your site, rather than the general case. It takes about two minutes and does not need an account.