Claude doubled our AI visibility

You don’t need an agency, plugins, and absolutely not a new SaaS subscription.

What we did was open the doors for AI crawlers and rebuild our website’s theme so that machines, not just people, can understand it. Now EdgeNectar shows up in AI answers twice as often as before.

If you’re not familiar with answer engine optimization (AEO), how to optimize your website for AI assistants, it’s easy to miss this part. That’s why you need to start here.

What we did

We opened the doors. Our site lets every AI crawler in, with nothing blocked but the admin area. Next to the usual sitemap, we publish an llms.txt: a plain-language briefing written for language models. It tells them in a few lines who we are, what we do, and which page answers which question. It’s refreshed every time we publish something new.

We taught the site to explain itself. Every page now carries structured data, a machine-readable label that says “this is a company”, “this is a question and its answer”, “this is a definition”. The key decision: that label is generated from what’s actually on the page, never typed in separately. The page and its label can never say different things, and consistency is exactly what AI models reward.

We wrote answers. Every FAQ on the site is automatically tagged as question-and-answer data, 15 pages and counting, without anyone maintaining it by hand. And for autonomous private 5G, the concept our CEO introduced, we built a definition page that tells AI models exactly what the term means and where it comes from.

We cut the clutter. The old site ran on a page builder and more than a dozen plugins. The new one runs on a lean custom theme with a few small plugins, and every title, description and signal is written on purpose.

The numbers

In August, as we started the rebuild, I ran 161 real buyer questions through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. EdgeNectar was named in just 1.9% of the answers, and only for narrow local questions. Even for “private 5G providers in San Jose”, our own city, we landed third to fifth.

Now, with the new website live:

• AI visibility has roughly doubled.
• We’re named first when buyers use our language. Ask ChatGPT for “a private 5G network that manages itself” and EdgeNectar now tops the list as the strongest match.
• Google impressions are up 41% in three weeks, from 647 to 915.

Let’s be honest about it: doubling from 1.9% is just a start, and the technical groundwork didn’t make us the answer by itself. It made us readable, and that is what I want everyone to understand. Your website needs the foundations that make it readable for AI assistants. Most older websites don’t have them in place, and that risks leaving you out of the answers.

So far, we win when the question uses our own terms, and not yet on broad “best vendor” questions. Getting there takes something no website can do alone: other people talking about you.

Why build it yourself

When I started this project, I decided never to download or use a plugin unless it was strictly necessary. An SEO plugin gives every website the same generic output, and AI search rewards the opposite: precise, consistent signals that match your content exactly. That’s why we don’t pay for third-party plugins or SaaS subscriptions unless they’re truly critical.

With Claude Code, the gap between “we need a tool for that” and “we built that” has shrunk to an afternoon. We own every line, there’s nothing to renew, and when we publish a new page, everything AI needs to understand it ships in the same step. Save the extra dollars and put them into something worth citing instead.