Your Competitors Are Already Invisible to AI. Are You?

Every day, millions of people ask AI a question your business should be answering - and your website is not in the room.

I am currently trying to sell my house. 2390saratogabay.com is the listing site I built for it. Nice little site. Good content. And I had no idea whether ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity could find it - or would cite it - if someone asked about homes backing up to a private country club golf course in West Palm Beach.

So I did what any reasonable developer would do. I asked Claude to audit it for AEO readiness.

That did not go well.

Turns out you cannot just point an AI at a website and ask it to spider every page, read the robots.txt, check the structured data, and synthesize a report. Claude is a language model, not a crawler. I learned this the hard way, after a fairly humbling conversation where it politely explained what it actually could and could not do. Interesting conversation, actually. But not the answer I needed. If I wanted a real audit, I was going to need code.

So I wrote code.

Here is the thing about AEO that I think a lot of people are sleeping on. SEO was about getting ranked. AEO is about getting cited. Those are not the same thing, and the difference matters more than most people realize.

When someone asks ChatGPT about homes backing up to a private club golf course in West Palm Beach, they do not get ten blue links. They get an answer. One answer. Synthesized from whatever sources the model decided were structured, credible, and parseable. If your site is not set up for that, you are not ranked lower. You are not in the room at all. That is a cool distinction until you realize it applies to your business too.

The numbers make this hard to wave off. Zero-click searches now represent 65 to 70 percent of all Google queries. Google AI Overviews went from appearing on about 6 percent of searches in January 2025 to over 30 percent by the end of the year. And here is the part that got my attention: visitors who arrive via AI search convert at 4.4 times the rate of traditional organic traffic. So yes, the room is getting crowded. And the businesses already in it are pulling ahead.

That is not snake oil. That is a structural change in how people find things.

So I built AEO Checker. The first version was purely selfish - just for my own sites. Principal coding took about two days. Debugging and finishing touches took another two. All automated, no manual steps. You put in a URL, it crawls the site, scores it across six audit modules, and emails you a report: your letter grade, your top three priority fixes with step-by-step instructions, and three ready-to-paste assets - an llms.txt file, LocalBusiness JSON-LD, and FAQPage JSON-LD.

About two days in I started thinking other people might find this useful. Because here is the honest truth: this is not rocket science. But figuring out what your specific site actually needs, tracking down the right schemas, writing the llms.txt, verifying your structured data is even visible to a crawler... that is a week of work. Easily. I know because I did it. And I have now done it for several of my own properties.

2390saratogabay.com is scoring an A. I know exactly what needs fixing on calevans.com and heartsntales.com. Have not implemented those yet, but I am not guessing. I know. And knowing is the difference between being in the room and not.

So here is the question worth sitting with: when someone asks an AI about the problem your business solves, are you the answer - or are you somewhere the AI never looked?

Originally posted on LinkedIn: "Your Competitors Are Already Invisible to AI. Are You?"