Hacks
One thing to do, backed by a dated study on this site.
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Does ChatGPT give the same answer twice? Ask before you trust a shortlist
Same prompt, fresh chat, different answer. Run an AI shortlist twice and keep only what appears both times.
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Keep facts in body text, not in schema or meta tags
Four common HTML-to-text tools all kept body text and dropped JSON-LD, meta descriptions, aria-labels, data- attributes and comments.
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Ask an AI answer when its “current” figure is from
Google AI Mode and Gemini left the date off 7 “current” UK figures. Both errors I found were side figures next to the headline number.
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Tell ChatGPT who you are in your first message
One sentence about who was asking changed ChatGPT’s shortlist, and it ended all six answers by asking about my business anyway.
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Does naming a crawler in robots.txt override User-agent: *?
Yes. A crawler follows the group that names it and ignores the * group. The Sun’s robots.txt uses this to let OpenAI in.
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Put the date in the same sentence as the figure
7 of 40 AI answers to “current” UK figure questions gave no date. If you publish figures, put the period in the sentence that carries the number.
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Write your customer into the page: AI shortlists change with who’s asking
Add one sentence about who’s asking and ChatGPT and Gemini recommend different software. Say on the page who your product is for, in their words.
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How to block AI training crawlers but still let ChatGPT-User in
Most of the UK’s biggest news sites block AI training crawlers and leave the user-triggered fetchers open. Here’s the robots.txt that does it.