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Automation and Delivery Lead, Emerging Group
Richard leads automation and delivery across the Emerging group, working with EDP on client websites and with ETT on enterprise AI and process automation. He is the person who turns an audit finding into a working fix: crawler access, rendering, tracking, structured data and the plumbing that most marketing teams never see. He writes the technical guides on this site.
Most marketing dashboards still report rankings and sessions, and neither tells you whether AI engines recommend you. AI referrals land in Direct, citations never register as a visit, and nobody checks whether the crawlers can get in. Here are the four measures a 2026 dashboard needs.
Structured data is sold as a cheat code for AI search. It is not, and the evidence says so. What it actually does is stop engines misidentifying your business and misreading your pages, and on most sites we audit it is either absent or actively wrong. Here is what we find and what to do about it.
Between Cloudflare's default settings, security plugins with a 'block AI bots' toggle, and robots.txt block lists copied from forums in 2024, a large share of business websites have opted out of AI search without anyone deciding to. Here is how it happens and how to tell if it happened to you.
The most common AEO failure we find has nothing to do with content. Google renders JavaScript; the AI crawlers do not. A page can sit at position one in Search Console and be a blank shell to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, and nobody notices because every dashboard is green.
OpenAI names Bing among the search providers behind ChatGPT search, and independent analyses in 2026 found most of ChatGPT's cited pages also rank in Bing's top results. Copilot is Bing. If your Bing coverage is thin, so is your ChatGPT visibility. Here is the fix.
Google says you can ignore llms.txt. Ahrefs found 97 percent of the files it studied were never requested. No major AI lab has committed to reading it. It is still a 30-minute job with no downside, as long as you know exactly what you are and are not getting. Here is how to do it properly.
You cannot improve what you do not measure, and most businesses have no idea whether AI engines mention them. Here is a manual measurement system that takes two hours a month, the five numbers to track, and when it is worth paying for a tool.
Googlebot renders JavaScript. GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot do not. A page can rank first on Google and be a blank shell to every other AI engine. Here is how to find the gap on your platform and close it, starting with the pages that matter.
Structured data will not magically get you cited, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. What it does is remove ambiguity about who you are, what you offer and what a page is. Here is the schema that matters, in priority order, with a working example.
GA4 added a native AI Assistant channel in May 2026, and it misses Perplexity, Google's own AI features and every session that arrives without a referrer. Here is the setup that shows you what AI traffic you are actually getting, which pages it lands on, and whether it converts.
A working robots.txt template for 2026 that keeps you visible in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot, lets you make a separate decision about model training, and avoids the copy-and-paste block lists that quietly remove sites from AI search.
Before you spend a penny on AI search optimisation, find out whether the AI crawlers can even get in. This is a 20-minute check you can do yourself, and in our audits it fails more often than any content problem.