How to optimize your content for AI search and agents

Want AI search engines and agents to find and use your content? 

Traditional SEO isn’t enough. AI systems process information differently. 

This guide breaks down key optimizations to help your content stay visible and rank in the AI era.

TL;DR: Quick AI optimization checklist

To optimize for AI search and agents: 

• Make content accessible with clean HTML/markdown and good structure. 
• Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt and firewall rules. 
• Return content fast, with key info high up. 
• Use semantic markup, metadata, and schemas. 
• Create an llms.txt file. 
• Check your content’s AI visibility.

Traditional SEO vs. AI search: The key differences

Many people ask how to optimize websites for AI search and agents instead of traditional SEO. 

Through building Andi, an AI search engine, we’ve learned key differences in approach.

From the AI side, we process 30–50 million pages daily to find quality content for search, summarization, and question-answering. 

But accessing and extracting useful information isn’t always easy. 

Here’s what we’ve learned about making content truly AI-friendly.

Speed and simplicity are critical

• Many AI systems have tight timeouts (1-5 seconds) for retrieving content. 
• Assume long content may be truncated or dropped completely after the timeout.

Clean, structured text wins

• Many AI crawlers don’t handle JavaScript well, if at all. Logical content structure in plain HTML or markdown is ideal.

Metadata and semantic matter more

• Clear titles, descriptions, dates, and schema.org markup help AI systems quickly understand your content.

Blocking crawlers can make you invisible

• In a world of AI agents, overly aggressive bot protection can cut you off entirely.

Differentiate AI training vs. AI search access

• Some AI crawlers collect training data, while others retrieve real-time content. You may want different policies for each.

Check your content’s AI visibility

• AI search engine test: Paste a URL into andisearch.com. If options like Summarize or Explain appear, your page is accessible and useful for AI.
• AI agent test: Use Firecrawl to see how AI agents perceive and access your content.

Dig deeper: How to monitor brand visibility across AI search channels

Key optimizations for AI accessibility

Configure robots.txt for AI crawlers

• Add a robots.txt with fairly open access. Allow or disallow crawlers on a case-by-case basis. 
• Here’s an example that allows access for AI search/agents but disallows training data collection:

# Allow AI search and agent use
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
User-agent: ChatGPT-User  
User-agent: PerplexityBot
User-agent: FirecrawlAgent
User-agent: AndiBot
User-agent: ExaBot
User-agent: PhindBot
User-agent: YouBot
Allow: /

# Disallow AI training data collection  
User-agent: GPTBot  
User-agent: CCBot  
User-agent: Google-Extended  
Disallow: /

# Allow traditional search indexing  
User-agent: Googlebot  
User-agent: Bingbot  
Allow: /

# Disallow access to admin areas for all bots  
User-agent: *  
Disallow: /admin/  
Disallow: /internal/  

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml  

Avoid overly aggressive bot protection

• Don’t use aggressive bot protection on Cloudflare/AWS WAF. 
• This will prevent AI crawlers and agents from accessing your content. Instead, allow major U.S. datacenter IP ranges.

Dig deeper: 3 reasons not to block GPTBot from crawling your site

Optimize for speed

• Return content as fast as possible, ideally under one second. 
• Keep key content high up in the HTML.

Use clear metadata and semantic markup

• Examples include:
  • Basic SEO tags: