Beyond Blue Links: Generative Engine Optimization and Agent Readiness

Ben cohen

Here's a scenario. A buyer at a mid size company needs new software. They open an AI assistant and ask for the five best options for their situation. They get a shortlist, a comparison, and a recommendation. Then they email their boss. And your website never saw a single visit.

Ido

And that's not a fringe case anymore. Forrester found that 94% of business buyers now use AI search when they buy, and they rated it above vendor websites, product experts, and sales reps. Above the sales rep, Ben.

Ben cohen

Which is a little painful if you run a sales team. So the question for this episode is simple. How does a brand stay visible when the thing standing between the customer and the web is an AI assistant? I'm Ben Cohen.

Ido

I'm Ido Navarro, and this is Be Visible. Quick note on how we'll handle this. We'll separate what works today from what's experimental and what's still just a hypothesis, because this space is full of confident claims that nobody has really proven.

Ben cohen

Let's start with the obvious pushback. Is this really different from SEO? Because a lot of people say it's just SEO with a new name.

Ido

Partly, yes, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. Crawlability, clear content, authority, all of that still matters. But the output is different. Traditional SEO was about earning a position in ten blue links, and the prize was a click to a landing page you designed. Generative search does the synthesis before any click happens. The system reads a bunch of sources, builds an answer, and your brand either appears inside that answer or it doesn't.

Ben cohen

So the goal shifts. It used to be, get found. Now it's get found, then understood correctly, then trusted enough to be included, then recommended. Every step is a place to drop out.

Ido

Right, and the first drop out point is the shortlist. If the model never pulls your site into its set of candidates, nothing you wrote on your pricing page matters. And one thing I'd flag as uncertain. Researchers are still studying how these systems pick sources, and different assistants behave differently. Anyone who tells you they have the exact formula is guessing.

Ben cohen

That's why I like looking at the site the way the machine sees it. I built a free tool, the AI Content Reader at GetAISO, that strips away the styling, the JavaScript, the visual layers, and shows you what's left. And the first reaction people have is, wait, where did my homepage go?

Ido

That's the gap. Think of your website as an ornate restaurant. Beautiful lighting, great furniture, a carefully designed entrance. Humans love it. But the AI doesn't need the dining room. It needs the menu. What do you serve, who is it for, what does it cost, why should I trust you.

Ben cohen

And the machine is reading under a budget, right? You called it the token tax.

Ido

Yes. Models process text in chunks called tokens, and there are limits on how much they take in at once, plus a cost to processing it. A typical page is full of nested containers, repeated navigation, scripts, cookie banners, footers. All of that is noise the system has to wade through to find your three real facts. The cleaner the page, the less the model has to guess.

Ben cohen

So clean markdown is the menu. Headings, short paragraphs, lists, tables. Just the content, in order.

Ido

Exactly. And my hypothesis, and I'd call it a hypothesis, is that sites will increasingly serve different representations of the same page. A rich one for humans, and a lean one for machines. Some platforms already experiment with this. But I wouldn't claim every AI crawler asks for markdown today.

Ben cohen

Okay, the question I know people are waiting for. Does adding an llms dot txt file suddenly make a site visible?

Ido

No. Let me be direct about it. llms dot txt is a proposed convention. It's a markdown file at the root of your site that works like a concise map. Here's who we are, here are the most important pages, here's what each one covers. Then llms full dot txt goes further and puts the actual content in one place, so a system can take the whole thing in without crawling page by page.

Ben cohen

So the first is an index, the second is the whole cookbook.

Ido

Nice. And where is it useful today? Mostly with developer tools and documentation, and with AI coding assistants that people point at a site on purpose. For general AI search, there's no broad confirmation that the major assistants rely on these files to rank or cite you. So it's experimental. Cheap to do, potentially helpful, not magic.

Ben cohen

My view is that the file is worth making because writing it forces you to answer the hard question. If you had to summarize your company in one page for a machine, what would you say? Most companies can't do that cleanly.

Ido

Agreed. And tools like LLMagnet fit here as one example. It can help generate and manage those files and track how your brand shows up across AI platforms. Useful, but you can do the manual version too. The principle matters more than the product.

Ben cohen

Now schema. People hear structured data and their eyes glaze over.

Ido

Think of it as labels in the kitchen. Schema dot org markup tells a machine explicitly, this is an organization, this is a product, this is the author, this is an FAQ, this is a local business, this is an event. You're not hoping the model infers it from the layout.

Ben cohen

And the trap is when the labels lie.

Ido

Schema drift. The markup says a product costs one price and the visible page says another. Or the schema claims reviews that aren't on the page. Or a plugin auto generates the same generic markup across five hundred pages. That doesn't just fail to help. It can erode trust, because now your structured claims and your visible claims disagree. And schema can't rescue weak content. If the page is vague, tagging it just labels vagueness precisely.

Ben cohen

Let me bring in the brand side. Even with perfect pages, the model learns about you from elsewhere too. Reviews, articles, directories, people mentioning you. Some of the discussion lately suggests the sources that mention you may matter as much as the content you control. I'd treat that as an emerging signal, not a settled law.

Ido

Fair. Which means you can't just fix your own site and walk away. Third party validation is part of the foundation.

Ben cohen

Now the part that really changes things for me. What happens when the visitor isn't a person, it's an agent acting for a person?

Ido

That's the next layer. A crawler reads. An agent might compare plans, fill out a form, book a demo, configure a product. If your pricing is buried in an image, your form has unlabeled fields, your checkout depends on a hover animation, then the agent understands you but can't use you. It moves to a competitor it can complete a task with.

Ben cohen

So agent readiness might be the next thing after mobile responsiveness, accessibility, and SEO. Clear labels, predictable flows, maybe APIs for the important actions. And honestly, a lot of what helps accessibility helps agents.

Ido

Yes. Though I'd say the standards here are early. Which protocols will win is open. What's safe to say is that clear, labeled, predictable actions help both people and machines.

Ben cohen

Okay, what can someone actually do this week?

Ido

Start by asking. Take the five questions your customers ask before they buy, and put them to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Write down who gets mentioned, how you're described, and what's wrong.

Ben cohen

Then make the basics explicit on your site. What you do, who you serve, where you operate, what it costs, who's behind it. Plain language, direct answers near the top. Then add accurate schema that matches the page, check that your robots rules aren't blocking crawlers by accident, and consider those llms files.

Ido

Then publish something worth referencing. Original data, clear definitions, real examples. And finally, test a journey. Can an assistant or agent actually get from question to action on your site? Repeat the prompts monthly, because answers change.

Ben cohen

And what not to do. Don't stuff keywords for AI. Don't mass produce hundreds of thin AI written pages. Don't believe one file solves everything. Don't block crawlers without understanding what you lose. And don't make the human experience worse just to please a machine.

Ido

One more. Don't only count citations. Being mentioned inaccurately, or with the wrong positioning, can be worse than not being mentioned. Check accuracy, tone, and whether it connects to business.

Ben cohen

Prediction time, clearly my opinion. In two to three years, the shortlist stage will matter so much that companies track AI visibility the way they track pipeline today.

Ido

Mine is that websites will quietly get a third face. Humans see the designed page, machines get a lean version, and agents get actions they can safely take. I could be wrong about the exact format, but I'm confident about the direction.

Ben cohen

So the takeaway. Visibility isn't only getting people to visit anymore. It's making sure machines can discover, understand, trust, represent, and eventually act with your brand correctly.

Ido

And your small action today. Pick one important customer question, ask several AI systems, and compare the answers. If you don't recognize your brand in them, you've found your first project. If this helped, follow Be Visible so you don't miss the next one.

Ben cohen

See you next time.