Why this matters
More clients now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI answers for a recommendation before they search. A small firm can rank well on Google and still be missing from those answers, and nothing tells you so until a partner asks ChatGPT and the firm is not named.
Rankite is an SEO agency that publishes free, no-sign-up tools. Three of them cover the part a marketing person controls: a checklist that scores how visible you are to AI, a generator that decides which AI bots may read your site, and a generator for llms.txt, a short map of your best pages written for AI tools.
Practice
Do every step yourself in a practice copy of the real tool. It checks your work, and “Do it for me” finishes any step you get stuck on.
What you’ll build
You are the marketing coordinator at a made-up 9-person employment law firm. You score its AI visibility (40 out of 100), build a robots.txt block that keeps five AI training crawlers out but lets ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Claude read the site, and write an llms.txt file for its key pages.
The screens are real screenshots of Rankite's free tools, used with no account in November 2026.
What you need
- Nothing to start the practiceThe lesson is a practice copy. The firm and its pages are made up.
- Rankite's free tools, to do it for realThe AI Brand Visibility Checker, the AI Crawler robots.txt Generator and the llms.txt Generator run in your browser with no account.
- Someone who can edit your website's filesrobots.txt and llms.txt live at the root of your site. Send both to whoever runs the website if that is not you.
Concepts
Training crawlers and answer bots are different
Training crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and CCBot collect pages that may shape future AI models. On-demand fetchers such as OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User and Perplexity-User read a page live because someone just asked a question.
Blocking the first group keeps your content out of training. Blocking the second keeps you out of cited answers. Many sites block both by accident with one broad rule, so check yours.
llms.txt is a map, not a promise
An llms.txt file is plain markdown at yoursite.com/llms.txt: your name, one summary line, and your most important pages with a short note each. Pages under an Optional heading can be skipped by an AI that is short on room.
It helps AI tools find the right page, but no file guarantees a mention. Treat it like a sitemap: cheap to make, worth having, not a ranking switch.
Score it, fix it, check it again
Rankite's checklist is ten honest yes-or-no questions, and the score is only as good as your answers. Its first suggested fix for our firm was simply to ask ChatGPT for the best providers in your category and city and see if you are named.
Do that before and a few weeks after you change anything, and write down the answer each time, so you can tell whether the changes worked.
Do it for real
Now repeat it in your own account. Tick each step as you go.
Quick check
3 questions to check you’ve got it.
1. The partners don't want their articles used to train AI, but they do want to be cited. Which bots do you block?
- Only the training crawlers, such as GPTBot and CCBot
- Every AI bot
- Only the on-demand fetchers
Show the answer
Only the training crawlers, such as GPTBot and CCBot. Training crawlers collect content for future models. On-demand fetchers like OAI-SearchBot and Perplexity-User read your page to answer a live question, so blocking them keeps you out of answers.
2. Where does the robots.txt block from Rankite go?
- Near the top of your existing robots.txt, above the User-agent: * section
- In place of your whole robots.txt
- In the llms.txt file
Show the answer
Near the top of your existing robots.txt, above the User-agent: * section. Rankite's generator says so under the block: it adds to your file and does not replace the rest of it.
3. Your llms.txt file is live. What does it guarantee?
- Nothing on its own; it helps AI tools find your key pages
- A mention in ChatGPT
- A higher Google ranking
Show the answer
Nothing on its own; it helps AI tools find your key pages. It is a map for AI tools, not a ranking switch. Check the result by asking the same question again in a few weeks.
TryPost: Turn One Blog Post into a Week of Scheduled Social Posts
For a software company that wants its pricing FAQ quoted in Google’s AI Overviews, see the second Rankite lesson: score the page, rewrite it around buyer questions, and add FAQ and product schema that checks clean.
Start module 34 →