A Guide for You and Your AI Agent

It might sound like a completely new discipline. For the most part, it isn’t.

Google says its AI search features still rely on its core search systems. Your content still needs to be crawlable, indexable, and useful.

Microsoft says that Bing’s index is evolving from a list of pages into a source of facts that AI systems can use to build answers.

Put those two ideas together, and the real change becomes clearer: AI search still depends on traditional search, but ranking is no longer the whole job. Your content also needs to provide facts that AI systems can understand, trust, and cite.

To optimize a page for AI search, make sure AI systems can access it, answer a relevant question with information worth retrieving, state important facts clearly, keep those facts current, and monitor citations.

An AI agent can help check access, review passages, spot inconsistencies, and analyze citation data; you still decide what to publish.

This article explains the thinking behind AI search optimization so you understand what to do and why. It also covers what you should check manually, when a manual review is worth the effort, and provides prompts you can give an AI agent when the work can be handled reliably.

The AI skills and prompts can be used in agentic environments such as Letaido, Claude Code, ChatGPT Agents, and Codex.

Nothing else in this guide matters if AI systems can’t reach your pages.

Before they can cite your content, they need to be able to access and read it. There are a few places where you check for technical issues manually, and if you prefer your agent to take care of this, I’ve prepared an AI prompt at the bottom of this section.

First, go to Site Audit → All issues and scroll to the AI discoverability section. You’ll see any AI-specific issues affecting your pages, along with recommendations for how to fix them.

In Bot Analytics, investigate unsuccessful AI bot requests, especially 404, 499, and 5xx status codes. The status code helps you distinguish missing URLs from interrupted requests and server errors before choosing a fix.

Open the Status codes report and click the number of affected pages to see which pages to fix.

Then, in Web Analytics, check which 404 pages are getting traffic from people AI search. If the same broken URL keeps getting visits, redirect it to the most relevant live page.

A recurring 404 can also reveal a content opportunity. If AI keeps sending users to a page about a topic you don’t cover, consider whether that page should actually exist.

Some access problems can’t be found with a typical site crawl. You’ll also need to check your server, firewall, or CDN (if you use one)

To check whether any AI crawlers are currently blocked, go to AI Crawl Control → Security.

You can also use an AI agent to run these checks for you instead of clicking through different tools.

With the right access, an AI agent can check robots.txt, noindex rules, status codes, redirects, visible content, links, WAF rules, crawler visits, blocked bot requests, and even pages behind a login. It can then suggest fixes or, where appropriate, make them for you.

For example, if you use Ahrefs (Lite or higher for API access) and Cloudflare (the free tier works), you can run the whole check with a single prompt using this AI crawler access audit prompt. Just show the above link to your AI agent.

Here’s an example report finding (ran in Letaido):