A lot of what circulates about AI citations is adapted from SEO, borrowed from AI-safety discourse, or simply wrong — advice that made sense in a different context, applied without checking whether it translated to a local business’s situation.
The most common version of this: something spread across SEO forums and LinkedIn in 2024, it became conventional wisdom, and now business owners are acting on it without a clear source. Sometimes the claim is true for large brands and false for small businesses. Sometimes it was true six months ago and the engines have since changed. Sometimes it was never well-supported to begin with.
This cluster is where we examine those claims with sources attached — not just
the conclusion, but the evidence behind it, who produced it, and whether it
holds for a local or niche business that didn’t have a PR team generating the
data in the first place. The three questions driving Cluster C right now: what
blocking AI crawlers in your robots.txt actually does to your visibility,
whether llms.txt files change anything in practice, and whether GEO and AEO
are new disciplines or SEO rebranded with different acronyms.
Short answers exist for each. The pieces below go longer — because a one-line answer to a contested question is just another claim without a source.
Start with the audit we ran on our own name — named 4, cited 0, out of 100 — and browse the rest below as it lands.