AI search and answer engines

From Google's guidance for site owners (AI features and your website):

• To appear as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. There are no additional technical requirements, and Google does not guarantee crawling, indexing or display.
• Existing basics still matter: allow crawling in robots.txt and in any CDN or hosting firewall, link important pages internally, provide a good page experience, put important content in text, support it with good images and video, make structured data match the visible text, and keep your Business Profile up to date.
• Traffic from AI features is counted in the Search Console Performance report under the “Web” search type.
• To limit what appears from your pages, use nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet or noindex. Robots rules for Googlebot control crawling for Search, including its AI features.

Bing's webmaster guidelines say Bing and Copilot rely on the same crawling, indexing and ranking foundation as traditional search, and that the practices that help indexing also help eligibility for AI answers and citations. Bing asks site owners to make URLs easy to discover through IndexNow submissions, XML sitemaps, internal links and links from relevant sites, and not to block Bingbot in robots.txt (Bing Webmaster Guidelines).

Several AI companies publish separate crawler names for search and for model training, so you can allow one and block the other. Each company documents its own rules:

A mover who wants to be cited in AI answers should allow the search crawlers. Allowing or blocking the training crawlers is a separate business decision. A robots.txt that does both, with the training crawlers shown blocked because that is one valid choice rather than a recommendation:

# Search and answer engines: allowed
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /


User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Crawler names and behavior change. Read each operator's page before you copy rules, and check that your hosting provider's firewall or bot settings are not blocking the crawlers you allowed.

Google asks that important content be available in text form. Write out the details customers ask movers about, so any search or answer engine can read them without guessing:

• the towns you serve and whether you do long-distance moves
• how you estimate: in-home, video or phone, and what changes the price
• what is included in a standard move and what costs extra
• items you do not move
• your registration: legal name and U.S. DOT No.
• how deposits, cancellations and claims work, in your actual policy wording

Put each answer near the top of its section, under a heading phrased the way a customer would ask. Keep it consistent with your Business Profile and your structured data, because Google asks for that consistency (Google AI features guidance).

Be cautious with offers to “optimize for AI” through special files, hidden text or bulk-generated pages. Google says no special files or markup are needed for its AI features, and it lists mass-produced pages without value as scaled content abuse (Google spam policies). Google's own advice on hiring help asks whether any “AEO” or “GEO” advice you receive matches its official guidance (Do you need an SEO?).