Free 9-page guide

Get Found by Google and AI

Most sites aren't invisible because of bad content. They're invisible because of one wrong line in one file. Here's the 15-point check I run on hookem.ai, what ChatGPT search actually needs from your site, and a script that tests all of it in one command.

Free 9-Page Guide

Most sites aren't invisible because of bad content. They're invisible because of one wrong line in one file. Here's the 15-point check I run on hookem.ai, what ChatGPT search actually needs from your site, and a script that tests all of it in one command.

What's inside

The four questions every crawler asks your site, Google's and ChatGPT's alike, and the artifact that answers each one
Which AI crawler does what: why blocking GPTBot keeps you out of training but not out of ChatGPT search
What Google says AI Overviews need from you (nothing extra) and what structured data does and doesn't do
seo-check.sh: 15 checks in one command, with real output from a bare site (4 pass) and hookem.ai (15 pass)
The habit that saved me twice in one week: open the file before you trust a dashboard or an AI
A 15-item launch checklist plus the Search Console and Bing steps to tell search engines you exist

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01
What You Get
The four questions every crawler asks your site, Google's and ChatGPT's alike, and the artifact that answers each one
Which AI crawler does what: why blocking GPTBot keeps you out of training but not out of ChatGPT search
What Google says AI Overviews need from you (nothing extra) and what structured data does and doesn't do
seo-check.sh: 15 checks in one command, with real output from a bare site (4 pass) and hookem.ai (15 pass)
The habit that saved me twice in one week: open the file before you trust a dashboard or an AI
A 15-item launch checklist plus the Search Console and Bing steps to tell search engines you exist
02
The Details

What's inside

Search has two front doors now: the classic results page and AI answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. Both start the same way, with a crawler visiting your site and trying to make sense of it. Google's own documentation says there are no extra requirements for its AI features, so the fundamentals are the whole game.

This guide walks through every artifact using hookem.ai as the case study: robots.txt and sitemap.xml, the AI crawlers and what blocking each one costs you, the title and description that become your search result, structured data, and the link preview card. Each comes with a one-line test you can run on your own site.

You get the full seo-check.sh script with real before and after output, the Search Console and Bing setup steps, and a launch checklist. Plus the lesson from launch week: a search result, a dashboard and an AI's answer are all second-hand. The file is first-hand.

Who this is for

Builders who shipped a site and aren't sure Google or ChatGPT can see it
Developers who keep hearing 'GEO' and want to know what's real and what's hype
Founders who want a checklist they can run before launch instead of guessing

About the author

Jonathan is a software engineer at Amazon, building Hookem — an AI tool that analyses what makes content go viral — alongside his day job.

Every product decision is documented in public. These guides are the written version of that process.

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