How a site went from zero to most traffic from ChatGPT: an AI-search optimization checklist
jamesbrooksco · x · 2026-10-27
The author had his Nous Research Hermes agent make his new site readable for AI search engines, measured with treg.ai — a week later ChatGPT went from zero visitors to his main traffic source. Concrete changes: 1) robots.txt admits ChatGPT/Perplexity search bots while blocking AI training crawlers; 2) llms.txt plus a public JSON feed of live content; 3) a short, dated "quick answer" atop key pages; 4) one page per search intent, which is where ChatGPT sends users; 5) structured data matching actual page content; 6) tracking ChatGPT visits via PostHog, since they show up as "direct" unless you look for the referral tag.
Related event: AEO experiment makes ChatGPT a top traffic source in one week(4 posts)→
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