Look at these for inspiration first
StudioHawk's flagship content asset — a free, interactive resource that tells brands exactly what to do to get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI. Not what's happening. What to do.
StudioHawk publishes the most actionable AI SEO resource in Australia. 50 tactics, grouped by category (Content, Technical, Earned) and filterable by industry vertical. Every tactic ends with a specific first action — not a recommendation, a task.
The key differentiator: most AI SEO content tells brands what's happening. This tells them what to do this week. It reads like an operations manual, not a think piece.
"Improve your topical authority and ensure AI crawlers can access your content."
"Audit the 20 queries AI is already answering in your category. Log every answer where a competitor — not you — is cited. Each gap is a content brief. Start with the top 5."
The handbook is built as a manual, not a list. 8 chapters, each with a short body of content explaining the why behind that area, followed by the tactics for that chapter. Readers work through it sequentially or jump to the chapter relevant to them.
The pillar page at studiohawk.com.au/ai-seo-handbook/ is the master index — it houses the full handbook and links into each chapter.
Before any content strategy matters, AI needs to be able to crawl and understand your site. This chapter covers the non-negotiable technical foundations — the ones most brands get wrong without realising.
AI reads pages like documents, not like humans do. This chapter covers how to structure and format your existing content so AI can pull clean answers from it — without a full rewrite.
AI ranks brands as sources, not just pages. This chapter is about becoming the definitive source on your topic — through depth, structure, and consistent coverage that no competitor has matched.
Original data is the content AI reaches for first. This chapter is about creating the kind of source material that AI cites repeatedly — studies, benchmarks, case results, and proprietary insights.
The most commercially valuable AI queries are decision-phase queries. This chapter is about owning the "which is best" and "help me choose" answers before third-party sites do.
AI doesn't just read your content — it looks up your brand in external sources to verify you're real and credible. This chapter covers how to control what it finds.
AI uses Reddit, YouTube, podcasts, trade press, and community forums as high-trust source material. This chapter is about building a genuine presence in the places AI looks beyond your own website.
AI citation patterns shift faster than traditional search rankings. This chapter closes the loop — how to measure where you're being cited, where you're not, and how to close gaps before competitors do.
Each tactic includes: a plain-English description, effort and cost rating, time to impact, a specific first action, and a StudioHawk-sourced proof point. Plus relevant internal and external links.
Total: 5–7 weeks from sign-off to live. Fastest path: build as a single self-contained HTML file, cuts dev to ~1 week.
A rough functional prototype — not the final design. All 50 tactics, filters, and roadmap builder are working.
Before any content strategy matters, AI needs to be able to crawl, render, and understand your site. Most brands skip this chapter entirely — and wonder why their content never gets cited.
AI search engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini — all rely on crawlers to build the index they search against. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended are all live and actively indexing the web. If your robots.txt is blocking them, or your site relies on JavaScript to render the content crawlers need to see, you are invisible to those platforms regardless of how good your content is.
The good news: this is the easiest chapter to act on. A single robots.txt edit can unlock your site to every major AI crawler in under an hour. Server-side rendering is a bigger project, but auditing whether you have a problem takes minutes.
Sitemaps matter more than most brands realise. AI-linked crawlers use your sitemap to prioritise what to index. An outdated or poorly structured sitemap means your newest and most relevant content is crawled last — sometimes weeks late. Splitting sitemaps by entity type (products, articles, landing pages) and keeping lastmod accurate signals to crawlers what's worth their attention.
Core Web Vitals are a direct signal. Slow pages are deprioritised by AI citation systems — not just Google. Every money page should pass CWV before you invest in content on it. This chapter gives you five specific actions to check and fix.
Most AI SEO content tells you what's happening. This tells you exactly what to do. 50 specific, sequenced tactics built from 100+ client audits.
Filter by vertical to re-rank for your industry. Each tactic expands to show the specific first action to take.