The answer engines haven't called
I did the AEO work — llms.txt, structured data, doors open to every AI crawler. ChatGPT still hasn't cited SoiTarot once. Here's why that's exactly what I'd expect.
Half of the reason to run the SoiTarot experiment was the new front in search: the answer engines. More and more queries never reach a blue link — they get resolved inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews, which read the web and summarize it. So I built SoiTarot to be readable by machines that answer, not just crawlable by ones that rank. Then I watched. And so far, the answer engines haven't called.
What "building for AI answers" actually meant
AEO — answer engine optimization — isn't mystical. It's mostly about being legible and being trusted. SoiTarot got the legible part on day one:
| Signal | Status |
|---|---|
llms.txt (a map for language models) | shipped |
| Structured data — Article, FAQ, HowTo, Breadcrumb | on every page |
| Doors open to AI crawlers | welcomed, not blocked |
| IndexNow ping on every deploy | automatic |
| Clean, passage-shaped content (a system can quote) | by design |
That's the whole legibility checklist, and it was cheap — the same fence and structure that served Google also serve an LLM trying to extract a clean answer. If an answer engine wants to cite SoiTarot, nothing on the page stops it.
The scoreboard, honestly
Here's the part people don't show you. A few weeks in, the third-party tools that track AI visibility report the same number across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini:
AI citations, so far: zero. Not low — zero.
Google's classic index is filling steadily; the answer engines haven't quoted the site once. And I think that's correct, not broken.
Why zero is the expected number
Legibility gets you eligible to be cited. It doesn't get you chosen. Answer engines are, if anything, more conservative than ranking — when a model puts a claim in front of a user as an answer, it leans on sources that already carry authority signals: links, brand mentions, a known entity, age. SoiTarot has none of those yet. It's three weeks old, has zero backlinks, and no entity to speak of.
So the same ceiling that keeps the big head terms on page two of Google keeps SoiTarot out of the answer boxes: the authority layer I deliberately haven't built. Citations are a trailing signal — they tend to follow traditional ranking and real-world mentions, not lead them. Zero at week three isn't a failure of the setup; it's the setup waiting for the authority it hasn't earned.
What I'm actually watching
This is why I'm treating AI visibility as the second curve to watch, behind organic keywords. The hypothesis is simple and checkable: as the long tail matures and the domain ages, the first AI citations should appear on the low-competition, high-specificity pages — the exact "Cancer and Sagittarius" combinatorial cells where SoiTarot genuinely answers a narrow question better than a generic listicle. If AEO works the way I think, that's where it cracks first.
I built the site so the answer engines can quote it. Whether they will is the open question — and the honest status board reads zero. I'd rather show you the zero than pretend the doors-open part was the hard part. The doors were easy. Earning the knock is the work that's still ahead.