Frequently asked questions
Everything you need to know about Generative Engine Optimization, AI-readiness audits, brand monitoring, and how Knownwise helps your content get discovered and cited across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.
About GEO & AI visibility
The concepts behind Generative Engine Optimization and how AI engines surface your brand.
What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
GEO is the work of making your site and your brand easy for AI assistants to find, understand, cite and describe accurately. It sits next to SEO: the same technical basics, applied to generated answers instead of ranked links.
Can I audit my site without an account?
Yes. Paste your public URL and you get a 0 to 100 AI-readiness score across seven technical checks with prioritised recommendations. No account, no install.
Which assistants does tracking cover?
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Each run records whether your brand is mentioned, where in the answer, the sentiment, and which competitors appear alongside you.
Can I compare myself with competitors?
Yes. Add the competitors you care about and every run shows who was mentioned for the same questions, across assistants and over time.
Can I share results with my team or my agency?
Audit results have a public page. Tracking has a scorecard link you can copy, rotate or revoke. Nobody needs an account to view either.
Where do the cited sources come from?
From each assistant's own web search: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity all search the web when they answer. We keep the pages each answer cites, the searches it ran where the assistant reports them, and whether your domain was among them.
Do I need to install anything on my site?
Not for the audit or tracking. The audit reads your public pages, and tracking asks the assistants directly. Counting AI bot visits on a paid plan is the one exception: connect Cloudflare, or add one small file to your site.
What can I use today?
A free seven-check site audit, then tracking on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity: your questions grouped by topic, the competitors named in the same answers, the sources each answer cites, a brand agent that answers from your data, and on paid plans, which AI bots read your site.
Plans & using the platform
Pricing, billing, and how the audit and brand-monitoring features work.
Can I try before I buy?
Yes. Starting is free: your first report and a few site audits a month need no card. Every paid plan is risk-free too, with a free trial or a full refund from Settings. The pricing page has the details.
What is brand monitoring?
Brand monitoring checks how often your brand is mentioned by AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. It tracks mentions, positioning, sentiment, and visibility over time.
Can I change plans later?
Yes, in Settings → Billing. Upgrades and added brands apply right away, and you pay the difference for the rest of your billing period. Downgrades take effect at the end of the period, and you keep your plan until then.
What payment methods do you accept?
Cards and Apple Pay, on a secure checkout page. Update your card or find your invoices in Settings → Billing.
Technical & AI-readiness
llms.txt, AI crawlers, audit mechanics, and the technical signals engines read.
What is AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)?
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so answer engines — AI assistants and featured-answer surfaces — can extract a direct, accurate answer to a user's question. AEO overlaps heavily with GEO: clear headings, question-and-answer formatting, FAQ schema, and concise, factual statements all make your content easier for an engine to quote verbatim.
What is an llms.txt file and do I need one?
llms.txt is a plain-text file placed at the root of your domain (like robots.txt) that gives AI models a concise, curated map of your most important pages and what they contain. It helps large language models find and prioritize your best content. Our free llms.txt generator creates one for any site in seconds.
Which AI crawlers should I allow in robots.txt?
To be visible in AI answers, allow the major AI crawlers: GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot and anthropic-ai (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), Google-Extended (Gemini/Google AI), and CCBot (Common Crawl, which trains many models). Blocking these removes your site from the data those engines rely on.
How long does an audit take?
An AI-readiness audit completes in under 60 seconds. We scrape your page, analyze seven readiness categories, and return a 0-100 score with prioritized, actionable recommendations — no signup required.
Will optimizing for AI hurt my traditional SEO?
No. The fundamentals of GEO — semantic HTML, complete metadata, structured data, fast and accessible pages — are the same signals that strengthen traditional SEO. Optimizing for AI engines improves both surfaces at once.
Glossary
Key terms used across GEO, AEO, and AI brand visibility.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
Optimizing content and structure so generative AI engines can discover, understand, and recommend a brand in their answers.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
Structuring content so answer engines can extract a direct, accurate answer to a question — closely related to GEO.
llms.txt
A root-level plain-text file that gives AI models a curated map of a site's key pages and their purpose, similar in spirit to robots.txt.
Structured data (JSON-LD)
Machine-readable schema.org markup that describes a page's meaning (organization, product, FAQ, article) so engines can parse it unambiguously.
Semantic HTML
Using meaningful elements (header, nav, main, article, section, footer) so crawlers and models understand the role of each part of a page.
AI crawler
An automated bot (e.g. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) that reads web pages to power or train AI answer engines.
Brand visibility
How often and how prominently a brand is mentioned in AI-generated answers across engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.
Want the deep dive? Read the complete GEO guide or compare GEO vs SEO.
Still have questions?
The fastest way to understand your AI visibility is to measure it. Run a free audit or generate an llms.txt in under a minute.