Does a website need special optimisation to appear in AI search?
For Google, no. Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimisations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode: a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet. Clear, crawlable, well-structured pages are the foundation for every search channel, AI or not.
Documented by the platforms
Google’s guidance for its AI features says site owners don’t need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema markup; existing search best practices apply.
Crawler controls separate AI training from search. OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot is for ChatGPT search, while GPTBot collects content for model training, and OpenAI says each setting is independent. Anthropic separates Claude-SearchBot from ClaudeBot in the same way. Google-Extended controls use in Gemini training and grounding and, Google says, does not affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search.
So blocking a training crawler is a different decision from blocking a search crawler. Making one without understanding the other can quietly remove a site from AI search answers.
In a 2024 paper on generative-engine optimisation, the authors’ methods raised visibility in generative-engine responses by up to 40% on their own benchmark, and how well each method worked varied by subject area. “Up to” is the best case on that benchmark, not a forecast for any particular site.
On Strange Forms we record every search and AI-discovery choice with the strength of its evidence: established practice, a study result, or a hypothesis. Facts are stated in text, structured data is checked against the visible page by the build, and there is no llms.txt and no FAQ markup.
Hypotheses we act on only because they also help readers: consistent names for the same thing everywhere, and sections that make sense when read on their own. Whether they change AI answers is untested.