How high-trust B2B companies can improve how they are understood, verified, and recommended in AI-generated answers.
A fully public website. No authentication. 200 OK on every test. ClaudeBot user-agent accepted. And yet: WebFetch blocked. Here is what happened, why it happened, and what it means for AEO.
llms.txt is not a standard, is not enforced, and there is no evidence it is used as a signal by ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. That does not mean it is useless. It means it sits in a grey zone.
Most AEO practitioners run prompts in a browser and call it a measurement. They're measuring the wrong thing. The gap between browser and API responses is where real brand risk lives.
You can have perfect structured data, strong citations, and excellent content, and still not appear in AI recommendations. The reason is usually the same.
AEO is not SEO with a different name. The signals are different, the content structure is different, and the failure modes are different. Here's what actually works.