I spent two weeks optimizing my site's SEO. Meta tags, structured data, Open Graph images -- the whole ritual. Then I asked ChatGPT about my own blog and got silence. Not wrong information. Not outdated information. Nothing . My site was invisible to AI. Turns out, I'd been decorating a house with no front door. The problem: AI can't read your site the way Google does Google's crawler is a patient librarian. It reads your sitemap, follows every link, indexes every page, and comes back next week to check for updates. It's had 25 years to get good at this. AI crawlers are more like an intern on their first day. They show up, get overwhelmed by your navigation menus and cookie banners and JavaScript bundles, and leave with a vague impression that your site exists. Maybe. The core issue: LLMs have a context window. They can't ingest your entire site. They need someone to hand them a cheat sheet -- "here's what this site is about, and here are the pages that matter." That cheat sheet is llms.txt .…