Your Website Is Rehearsing Without You

Lights up.

Right now, backstage at Portia & Cleo, I'm in the middle of a huge web build — a from-scratch website for one of the most respected nonprofits in my region. And for the first time, I'm not just directing this site for a human audience. I'm directing it for an audience I've never had to stage for before: the AI platforms standing between this organization and the people who need to find it.

This isn't traditional SEO anymore. It's AEO — answer engine optimization — and GEO — generative engine optimization. The practice of making sure that when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity a question your business can answer, your business is the one that gets named on stage.

I don't say any of this as theory. Before I brought this thinking to a client, I re-wrote my entire site (so know how lucky I am to be the expert this area and be able to do this for my business at any given minute) and ran the audit on it’s performance. In the last 30 days, Wix's "User queries on AI" metric — essentially, how often AI platforms are surfacing and citing my site — is up 612%. Site sessions are up 53%. Unique visitors are up 21%. That's not a fluke. That's what happens when you stop performing for a search bar and start performing for an audience that reads in full sentences, not keywords.

After a decade of building brand strategy for founders — and a few years before that, actually treading the boards as a theater student at the University of Washington — here's the thing I keep coming back to: brand and theater share the same architecture. Intention. A character the audience can root for. A story that moves people to act. A website is a stage. And if the actors on it — your pages — aren't hitting their marks, the audience walks out of the scene confused. It doesn't matter whether that audience is human or an AI model deciding who to cite.

Five Blocking Marks to Hit Before Monday

Blocking, if you didn't spend your twenties in a black box theater like I did, is the precise staging of where every actor stands and moves on a stage. Miss your mark, and the whole scene reads as noise. These are your website's blocking marks — the five places most founder-run sites are standing in the wrong spot for AI search to find them.

1.     Run the visibility test first. Before you touch a single page, ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity what they know about your business. That's your "before" photo — and most founders are shocked by how thin or wrong the answer is.

2.     Rewrite your opening lines to answer, not tease. Does your homepage — or your top service page — answer the reader's question in the first two sentences, or make them scroll to find it? AI engines don't reward a slow reveal. Neither, frankly, do people.

3.     Add real FAQ content, marked up so it's found. Take the actual questions people ask you in DMs and discovery calls, write the actual direct answers, and mark them up with FAQ schema — the code that tells AI systems "this is a question, this is the answer."

4.     Check who's allowed backstage. Your robots.txt file might be quietly blocking the very AI crawlers you want reading your site — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot. While you're in there, consider adding an llms.txt file: a plain-language cue card that tells AI systems exactly who you are and what you do. You can go to crawlercheck.com for a quick analysis.

5.     Make your name consistent everywhere it's said. Your bio, your About page, your directory listings, your social profiles — name your business and your role explicitly and identically across every mention. AI engines build authority from consistency, not vibes.

None of this requires a redesign. It requires two hours and your full attention.

I know you don't have a spare afternoon lying around — you're running the show and building the sets at the same time. But your website is your understudy. It's on stage delivering your lines when you're not in the room. It is, quite literally, your north star. That's worth two hours.

So here's my direction: open your calendar right now and block two hours this Monday, August 31st. Not "someday." Monday. Run the five marks above. That's the whole scene.

A Word on Using Claude for This

If you want a thought partner while you work through this, I'll be honest about mine: I use Claude for almost everything in this business, including untangling AEO strategy for client sites. But — and this part is not optional — nothing I publish is copied and pasted. Claude can hand me raw material: a first-draft FAQ answer, a rewritten opening line, a plain-English explanation of a schema tag. My job, every single time, is to pick up the editor's pen before any of it goes live. AI can suggest the scene. It cannot direct it. That's still my job. It's still yours, too.