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Arrow AI · AI visibility

How to not be invisible on AI

An assistant does not hand back ten links. It names two or three companies and stops. Here is what decides whether yours is one of them.

By , founder of Arrow AI ·

The five checks

What decides whether an engine names you

1

Can an AI crawler actually reach your site?

Nothing else matters until this is true. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and OAI-SearchBot each read your robots.txt before they read anything else, and a default file written for Google in 2019 often blocks them by omission or by an over-broad rule. In the Miami yachting market we audited, six companies out of a hundred were turning AI crawlers away at the door and had no idea.

Do this: Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and read it. If you cannot see those crawler names allowed, assume you are closed.

2

Does the engine know what your company actually is?

An answer engine does not browse, it resolves entities. It needs to place you: this company, in this city, selling this. If your site never states that in a form a machine can parse, the model infers it from loose marketing prose — and inference is where you get confused with a similarly named firm, or described with last year's offer.

Do this: Say who you are in one unambiguous place, and keep the name, address and offer identical everywhere else you appear.

3

Are your pages shaped like answers, or like brochures?

Buyers no longer type keywords, they ask full questions. “What does it cost to charter a yacht in Miami for a week with eight guests?” An engine answering that needs a page where the question is asked and answered in plain sentences. A page that buries the answer in a PDF, an image, or a paragraph of positioning language loses to a competitor who simply wrote it down.

Do this: For each of your top ten buyer questions, make sure one page answers it in the first two sentences.

4

Is there proof a model can point at?

Models hedge. Faced with two firms, they name the one they can attribute something concrete to: a number, a date, a named client, a published result. Vague superlatives are unusable — “the leading provider” gives an engine nothing to cite, while “audited 100 companies in August 2026” gives it a sentence it can repeat.

Do this: Replace one superlative on your site with one verifiable fact this week.

5

Does anyone else say it about you?

This is the part no one can fix from inside their own site. Engines weigh corroboration: the same claim appearing on sources they already trust. A brand mentioned nowhere but its own domain reads as a brand with no evidence. This is also the slowest signal to build, which is why it is worth starting before you need it.

Do this: Get named somewhere you do not control — a directory, an industry publication, a partner's site, a study.

What it looks like measured

Most companies fail this, and do not know it

We scored 100 yachting companies in Miami and Fort Lauderdale on exactly these signals. The sector averages 57/100, the best reaches 81, and not one reaches 85. Six of them actively block AI crawlers.

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How GEO works

The discipline behind these five checks, and what an answer layer has to do.

FAQ

What people ask about AI visibility

What does it mean to be invisible on AI?

It means an answer engine such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity does not name your company when someone asks it a question your business exists to answer. You may still rank on Google and still be invisible here, because an assistant returns one short answer naming two or three companies instead of a page of ten links.

How do I know if my company is invisible on AI?

Ask the engines the questions your buyers ask, in plain language, without naming your company. If competitors come back and you do not, you are invisible for that question. Do it across several phrasings, because a single prompt is not evidence.

Is being invisible on AI the same as ranking badly on Google?

No. They come apart often. A company can rank on page one of Google and never be named by an assistant, usually because its pages are readable by people but not resolvable by a machine. Crawlability overlaps; entity clarity and answer-shaped content do not.

How long does it take to stop being invisible?

Access and structure changes are usually read within weeks of the next crawl. Corroboration — other sites naming you — is the slow part and is measured in months. Anyone promising citations in days is selling something else.

Can I fix this myself?

The first three steps are ordinary web work and a competent developer can do them. The last two are editorial and reputational, and that is where most companies stall, because they require producing something worth citing rather than adjusting a setting.

Where can I see what this looks like measured?

We published an AI visibility index for 100 yachting companies in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. It scores each one on how readable and citable it is to answer engines: the sector average is 57/100 and no company reaches 85.

Find out where you stand

The audit runs these checks against your site and hands back what is missing, in priority order.

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