Originally published on StackJot . Republished here for the dev.to community. If you run a website and you have not yet noticed your AI-search traffic creeping up in analytics, you will soon. Six months ago, this site got roughly 3% of its referrals from AI assistants. Last month, it was 19%. The shift is not theoretical anymore — it is the new reality of how people find content. This guide is about one thing: how to make your website something that ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity will actually cite when a real person asks them a question. Not a vague theory of AI search, but the specific moves that worked on a real publisher's site, including the ones that did nothing and we wasted time on. If you are still optimizing only for the ten blue links, you are leaving a growing slice of your audience to your competitors who figured out AEO first.…