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?
When Gemini answers with Google Search grounding, we keep the pages it cited, the queries it ran, and whether your domain was among them. Other assistants are recorded from their responses; we do not claim grounding for them today.
Do I need to install anything on my site?
No. The audit reads your public pages, and tracking asks the assistants directly. You act on the recommendations in your own CMS.
What is coming next?
Prompts generated by topic, tracking of which domains the assistants cite for your category, and a brand agent that explains changes and drafts fixes. None of these is in a plan until the roadmap says 'Available now'.
Plans & using the platform
Pricing, billing, and how the audit and brand-monitoring features work.
Can I try before I buy?
Yes. The Free plan includes 3 AI-readiness audits per month at no cost, with no credit card required.
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?
Absolutely. You can upgrade or downgrade your plan at any time. Changes take effect at the start of your next billing cycle.
What payment methods do you accept?
We accept all major credit cards via Stripe. Payments are processed securely.
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.