More and more people don't search, they ask. Instead of digging through ten results, they put a question to ChatGPT, Perplexity or the AI summary above the Google results, and get a ready-made answer. The question for every business is simple and uncomfortable: when someone asks about a service like yours, will you be the one cited, or your competitor?
What has actually changed
Classic search sends a visitor to your website: you're in third position, the person clicks, lands on your site and reads. With AI search, the machine reads the websites on the user's behalf and returns a synthesised answer, sometimes citing its sources. Perplexity always gives links, Google AI Overviews often does, and ChatGPT depending on the context.
This has two consequences. The first is unpleasant: part of the traffic disappears, because the answer is obtained without a click. The second matters more: being the source of that answer brings a kind of trust that tenth position on Google never has. When an AI says “according to Dilys, a corporate website starts from €750”, that's a recommendation, not a search result.
How AI systems read your website (and why it's different)
Here's the technical difference most website owners don't know about:
They don't run JavaScript
Googlebot renders the page and sees the dynamic content. Most AI bots fetch the raw HTML and that's it. To them, a React or Vue site without server-side rendering is a blank page.
They come with different bots
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended are separate from Googlebot and are controlled separately in robots.txt. You may have blocked them without even knowing it.
They look for ready-made answers
The models extract passages that answer a question on their own. A clear question as a heading with a short answer below it gets cited far more readily than advertising copy.
They trust structure
Schema markup is the machine-readable way to state facts about yourself: who you are, what you offer, at what price, and how you answer frequently asked questions.
First, check where you stand
Before you change anything, look at the facts about your website. Ask us for a free AI visibility check: it shows whether AI bots have access, whether your text is visible without JavaScript, and whether you have structured data and llms.txt. No strings attached.
The most common surprise in these checks: websites that have blocked AI bots without the owner ever being asked, sometimes through a security plugin, sometimes by a previous contractor who decided on the client's behalf.
What to do (in order of importance)
1. Unblock access, if that's your decision
Check robots.txt for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended. For most businesses it pays to let them in: being cited in front of a potential client is pure gain. The exception is businesses whose product is the content itself: subscription media, courses, databases. What matters is that the decision is a conscious one.
2. Make sure the text exists without JavaScript
If your website is built on a modern JS framework, ask your developer about server-side rendering (SSR) or static generation. With a classic WordPress site there's usually no problem: the content is in the HTML from the very start. This difference between platforms matters more today than it did five years ago.
3. Write so that you can be quoted
The format AI loves is as old as FAQ sections themselves: a question as the heading, a clear answer in the first two sentences, details after that. The inverted pyramid of journalism works here too. Marketing promises (“innovative solutions for your success”) don't get cited, because they don't answer anything.
4. Provide machine-readable facts
Organization schema with address, phone and line of business; Service or Product with prices; FAQPage for the questions. This is the same work that also improves classic rankings: see the 12 reasons a website doesn't rank, most of them apply here too.
5. Add llms.txt
A short text file in the root of your website that tells language models what you offer and which pages matter, along the lines of robots.txt. The standard is new, still optional and being adopted gradually. That's exactly why it makes sense now: it takes half an hour and puts you ahead of those who haven't heard of it yet. Ours is at dilys.bg/llms.txt if you want an example.
Everything that makes a website understandable to artificial intelligence also makes it easier to understand for people and for Google. It's that rare optimisation with no trade-off.
But don't panic
AI search hasn't replaced classic search and won't do so tomorrow. Google remains the main source of traffic for the vast majority of Bulgarian websites, and SEO the safest investment in organic visibility. The right approach is to add the AI layer on top of well-done SEO work, not to drop one for the other.
If your website is limping along technically, start there: ask us for a free SEO check to see the basics, while the AI check covers the new layer. Both rest on the same things: clean code, clear structure, real content.
Conclusion
The change isn't in what you write, but in how machine-readable it is. Open up access, remove the JavaScript dependency, format the content as questions and answers, provide structured facts. These four things take days of work and put you ahead of the majority of Bulgarian websites, which haven't yet realised this channel exists.
Want to see where you stand right now? Ask us for a free AI visibility check, and if you don't like the result, talk to us about what's worth fixing first.
