Do AI Bots Help You Get Cited? What the Research Actually Says

0:00 Do AI Bots Help You Get Cited
Hey, I’m Jeremy with PushLeads and we help small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration and in this video I’m gonna ask him and gonna answer the question does letting AI bot in help you get cited by AI So if you’ve been living under a rock, you probably don’t know that half of all searches now Are AI searches or at least for service -based businesses? So you’ve probably heard this, but if you haven’t you’re a contractor working You probably don’t know it, but it’s gone from PushLeads % to 45 or 50% in the last year searches for service -based businesses people using AI. So AI isn’t going away. The Pandora’s box is So I had a situation happen about a week ago Week and half ago. I was working on redesigning redesigning my own site And I noticed that he was a little slow, so I was asking Claude my favorite AI I said, hey, why is my site slow? And it said oh well There’s a bot in Singapore that is choking your site to death I was like what and so what I realized is that my site Essentially was open to anyone anywhere And so there were bots that were just choking the site trying to scrape the site or hack the site And so I later on moved to cloud flare Which essentially allows you to put a

1:20 Moving to Cloudflare and Blocking Bad Bots
copies of the site out there a cashed copy of the site Just saved pages basically and I also decided to block anything except US and Canada And then what I started thinking was hey now that people now that bots can see my site And now people can see my site more Does this mean that AI will start citing me more because we’re showing up for Google’s AI overview in some chat DPT searches, but I was just wondering about that So that’s what kind of what we’re going to do here is jump into

1:49 Three Types of AI Bots Explained
this So the very first question is will AI help you? So the very first question is will AI recommend your business websites have this person websites have this simple switch And you can let AI bots crawl your site or you can lock them all together And so we asked this question does opening up your doors Does allowing your site allowing it to be found by AI does that make a difference and let’s take a look at the answer and Before we go into the answer we have to understand there are three kinds of bots out there, right? There are search bots training bots and user bots So search bots are sort of these you know ChatGPT or cloth or OpenAI search bots that Essentially want to see what your sites about Training bots are essentially bots that are getting better by looking at your website And then user bots are basically when users are using chat to BT or cloth and they’re fetching content and

2:49 Search Bot Access as a Baseline Requirement
The simple answer is yes Turning on opening up the site to crawlers and making it easier to be fine But found by crawlers makes the helpers allows the helpers to come in so allowing the search bots is a baseline requirement to be cited So if your site is running slow or you’re on it and it seems to be choking at times Check with your web person and see if there’s a a bot from Singapore that’s trying to choke your site to death You may need to move yourself to cloud flare or ask your web designer guy a web hosting company To make sure that your site isn’t being slowed down by these bots in other countries that are trying to hack you And so so that the data says that it’s super important

3:32 Slow Pages Hurt AI Citation Rates
to do that and And what we found here was that slow or broken pages get ignored so about 18 Less fewer citations events happen when pages are failing for AI searches And that’s over 75 percent of the time And this is from pro found via ipul rank And then we saw a point and then we saw a 22 percent visibility recovery For a website that actually made their site findable So why wasn’t I showing up and chatting to ubt searches? Maybe because Singapore somebody in Singapore decided to choke my site to death, right? Singapore got me again Just kidding probably a great place to go to but not to be hacked and edge caching Which is really what cloud flare does is the highest impact lever So it’s free to have your site keep your site on its current hosting But then you know have cloud flare cash try to cash me outside Have cloud have cloud flare cash your pages So basically that you have copies of your pages for the bots to crawl And then real people can go to those copy the pages or they can go to the real site when they’re actually on a contact form So that’s super awesome

4:43 Blocking Specific Bots Drops Citations
And the data says that ranking a bot hurts that bot’s own engine, right? So basically blocking chat ubt dropped Citations from point four down to ChatGPT point ChatGPT point zero zero zero zero zero three According to the study and blocking the Perplexity bot dropped the intensity to zero So I guess at this point i’m going to show all of t I’m super excited about that And then 82 point and then 88 point Anthropic percent of chat to be blockers were still cited Uh, so blocking leaks, but there’s not but it doesn’t prove that opening helps So essentially the bots are still going to try to get in but it makes it easier if you let them in

5:28 Training Bots Show No Measurable Difference
So training access there’s no proof that it helps There’s zero percent measurable difference if you care about letting a trainer bot in or not and the only controlled Uh, and the only controlled test was they found that robots texts made a zero made a zero And the only controlled test was and the only And the only controlled test really didn’t find a difference And then there’s a separate crawler architecture for OpenAI and thropic and they document that training bots are separate from live search And then third parties and then third party mentions

6:05 Third-Party Mentions Drive AI Recall
About a models and then third party mentions do drive recall a model’s ability to recall and recommend brand route And then third party mentions A model’s ability to recall and recommend a brand realized primarily on repeated mentions across the broader web Not on the site itself So basically the the data is saying that more crawling does not mean more citations, but can help Right. So the meta training crawler the cloud flare below blah 64 of a thousand AI requests observed came generated zero referral visits, right?

6:45 What Local Businesses Should Actually Do
So it’s somewhat muddy data for local businesses The citation is generally not on your website is generally Yelp or your own business website or the Google Business Profile BrightLocal found that businesses websites only represent about 42 Citations while Yelp appears in 80% and of all this is muddy to you. You should be on youtube You should be making videos on youtube like i’m doing because this is the huge path to showing up in AI search So what to do should you allow the helpers fix the errors? What should you do? So it’s regardless of what the data is saying I think that making your site more visible to the right kinds of people and the right kind of bots Mean that you’re going to be more cited because you’ll be easy Because it’ll be easier for you to because it’ll be easier for people to find you So you should allow the shirt so you should allow search and use your bots You should use edge caching You should treat the training bots as valuable and you should invest in your Google Business Profile Yelp and apple business connect and third party mentions And if you want to prove how it works you can set a baseline and compare performance results Across a four to eight -week window. We’ll be doing that ourselves The data is kind of saying it sort of helps but then does it you shouldn’t expect your logs and tracked the the bot to x And you can and then you should expect you and then you should inspect your logs and track the bot to xx Success and then you should audit your referrals. You should filter out the Google analytics for And you should monitor sov you should run 50 to 100 fixed buyer queries weekly to measure the true recommendations Share so hopefully that was helpful. I’m Jeremy ashburn with PushLeads and I’ll help and I helped small So hopefully that was helpful. I’m Jeremy ashburn with PushLeads and I help small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration talk soon