The tobecited blog
Playbooks and research on getting cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity — and turning AI answers into customers.
What this blog is for
This blog is written for the person answerable for a website’s traffic — a founder, a marketer, an in-house SEO — who has noticed that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity now answer the questions their site used to answer, and that those answers name somebody else. Every article starts from a check you can run yourself and ends with a change you can ship this week.
Three kinds of pieces get published here. Explainers on the mechanics assistants actually use: llms.txt, structured data, server-rendered HTML, crawler access. Step-by-step guides that take an hour or less and say plainly what they will and will not change. And measurements from our own runs, including the ones where the result contradicted what we expected.
What we do not publish: ranking factors nobody has documented, and the promise that a technical fix earns citations. Markup makes your facts machine-readable — no AI provider has said it buys a mention. Where the evidence stops, the article says so instead of filling the gap.
How these articles are made — one byline, no invented authors, no number without a primary source — is set out in our editorial policy.
How to Check If AI Mentions Your Brand
To check if AI mentions your brand, ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini the questions your buyers actually ask — "best [your category] for [your customer]" — in fre…
What Is Schema Markup and Does It Help AI Visibility?
Schema markup is a set of machine-readable labels — usually a small JSON-LD script inside your page — that states plain facts about your business: who you are,…
Do LLMs Read JavaScript? Why AI Crawlers Miss Your Content
Mostly, no. AI assistant crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot — request raw HTML from your server and discard JavaScript; content dependent on client-sid…
How to Create an llms.txt File (Step by Step)
To produce an llms.txt file, create a plain Markdown document containing four required elements — an H1 heading with the site name, a blockquote with a one-line…
What Is llms.txt and Does Your Site Need One?
llms.txt is a plain Markdown file that lives at the root of your website and gives AI systems a short, curated map of your most important pages. The format was…