Ramp hid an AI-only offer on its site; AI mentioned it to buyers 370 times in 32 days
VeryWellVersed · x · 2026-11-11
Ramp, a $60B company, ran an AEO (AI engine optimization) experiment: it placed a hidden offer on 50 pages that only AI bots could see—human visitors saw nothing—then tracked whether ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity would pass it on to real buyers.
Key findings:
- Over 32 days, AI mentioned the offer to buyers 370 times.
- Of three tested formats—Markdown, stripped-down HTML, and schema markup—only Markdown reliably surfaced in AI answers, despite everyone expecting schema to win.
- Within two weeks, the site logged thousands of visits from 7 AI platforms, with some bots (e.g., DeepSeek) disguising themselves as ordinary Chrome browsers.
Takeaway: AI-facing content is becoming a real acquisition channel, and Markdown is currently the most effective AI-readable format.
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