What is AI search optimization and is it real or hype?

Two documented facts, both checkable. No special markup, no submission form, no AI schema: Google's AI features guidance says eligibility rests on the ordinary requirements. Anyone selling AEO schema is selling markup that does not exist — and the structured data general guidelines separately prohibit marking up content not visible on the page.

And the crawler set got bigger, with independent controls. OpenAI's crawler documentation separates GPTBot (training) from OAI-SearchBot (search results) from ChatGPT-User (a user-initiated fetch). Google's crawler overview does the same on its side. A site that blocked one may be fully available to another.

Guaranteed inclusion in an AI answer: nobody controls the retrieval step, and we do not sell it. A tool that optimizes for AI by rewriting your copy in a template: assistants quote specifics — a price, a date, a named standard — and generated text has fewer of those, not more. A score out of 100 for AI readiness: there is no published specification to score against.

Our own measurement, which cuts against the whole category including us: across four assistant surfaces on 2026-10-01 we asked 68 buying questions in this market and our site was cited zero times, including on the twelve questions we had already published answers to. The work is defensible on its mechanics. It is not yet validated by our own instrument, and we will say so until it is.