INSIGHTS

Your website is no longer the front door

Buying decisions increasingly start inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews — engines that read your site without JavaScript and recommend whoever they can actually understand. If a crawler sees an empty shell or duplicate pages, you are not in the recommendation.

This issue covers what AI crawlers read, how citability works, and what to restructure first. The mechanics are simple: an AI engine fetches your raw HTML, extracts headings and body text, and decides whether your business answers a specific question well enough to cite. Sites that render everything client-side, or serve the same title and canonical tag on every URL, read as thin duplicates — and thin duplicates don't get quoted.

The fix is structural, not cosmetic: distinct titles and self-referencing canonicals per page, real crawler-readable content under every URL, and internal links a non-JS fetcher can follow.

Most businesses have never checked what a non-JS crawler actually sees on their site. Running that check is the first thing we do in an AEO engagement.