What are the most common mistakes when trying to appear in AI answers?
The common mistakes are blocking the search crawlers by accident, putting key facts in images or behind scripts, judging from a single answer, inventing authors or reviews, changing dates without changing content, and not measuring at all. Most are cheap to fix once you know to look.
Which mistakes cost the most?
Blocking the wrong bot. The most damaging mistake is blocking everything that looks like AI. OpenAI separates GPTBot (training) from OAI-SearchBot (search); a site can block the first and allow the second (OpenAI). Anthropic and Perplexity make similar splits (Anthropic, Perplexity). Blocking the search bot removes you from that engine's search answers.
Hiding facts. Prices, hours, service areas and credentials in images, PDFs or scripts may never be read. Google asks that important content be available in text (Google).
Judging from one answer. Answers vary between runs. Ask repeatedly before you decide something worked or failed.
Which mistakes damage trust?
Faking authorship or reviews. Google says any deception makes a page untrustworthy to users and its quality systems (Google).
Changing dates to look fresh. The same guidance flags changing page dates when the content has not substantially changed. Update the date only when you update the page.
Markup that does not match the page. Google says structured data must be a true representation of the page content and must not describe content readers cannot see (Google).
Which mistakes waste time?
- Writing a general page when buyers ask a specific question.
- Optimizing for one engine only.
- Fixing things before measuring a baseline.
- Changing many things at once, so you cannot tell what worked.
- Expecting results in a few days.
How do I catch these before they cost me?
Run a short checklist once a quarter. Read your robots.txt and look for the search crawlers by name. View your key pages with scripts turned off and see whether the facts are still there. Search your own business name and read what the sources say. Ask the engines your top five buyer questions, three times each, and write down the result with the date. Most of the mistakes above show up in the first hour of that routine, and the ones that do not usually show up as a gap between what you published and what the engines say back.
Frequently asked questions
Should I block GPTBot?
That is your choice about training. It is separate from appearing in ChatGPT search, which depends on OAI-SearchBot.
Is schema markup a mistake?
No, when it matches visible text. It is a mistake when it describes things the page does not show.
Is it a mistake to ignore Gemini?
Not necessarily. Choose engines your customers use, and check them.
What is the cheapest fix?
Reading your robots.txt. It takes five minutes.