When someone needs the help you offer, there’s a good chance they no longer start with Google. They open ChatGPT, ask Perplexity, or talk to the assistant built into their phone, and they describe their problem in plain language. What comes back isn’t a page of blue links to sift through. It’s a direct answer, often with a short list of names and sources the tool treats as trustworthy. AI SEO is the practice of making sure your name is one of them. If you’re a coach who has put real work into your website and your content, this is the next thing worth understanding, because the people asking AI about your topic are exactly the people you want to reach. This article covers what AI SEO for coaches actually is, how AI tools decide who to recommend, the file on your site that tells them who you are, and the kind of content that earns a citation.
That’s what AttractWell Office Hours covered on Thursday. If you’d like to catch one of these live, you can grab a seat for the next call. And if you want your website, your content, and the way AI reads your business all running in one place, you can try AttractWell for a dollar.
What Is AI SEO, and Why Does It Matter for Coaches?
AI SEO is the work of making your business easy for AI tools to find, understand, and recommend. Traditional SEO aims to rank your pages in a list of results a person scrolls through. AI SEO aims one step further: to make your business the answer an AI gives when someone asks a question, with no list to scroll at all. The two overlap, because both reward clear, useful, well-organized content. The payoff is different, though. When ChatGPT or Google’s AI answers a question, it usually names just a few sources. Being one of those few is worth far more than being the tenth link on a page nobody scrolls to.
For a coach, this matters because of who is asking. The person typing “how do I find a business coach who works with introverts” into an AI tool is describing your ideal client almost word for word. They’re not browsing. They’re asking for a recommendation and ready to act on it. If the AI knows you exist and understands who you help, you can show up at the exact moment that person is deciding who to trust. If it doesn’t, you’re absent from a conversation that was practically written for you.
The reassuring part is that a lot of AI SEO is handled for you at the platform level. The technical groundwork AI relies on, like a clean sitemap and the structured data that tells machines how your content is organized, is something AttractWell builds and maintains automatically. That leaves you free to focus on the part only you can do: describing who you serve, and publishing content that answers what they ask.
Is AI SEO the Same as GEO and AEO?
If you start reading about this, you’ll run into a few names for it, and they can make the whole thing sound more complicated than it is. AI SEO is the plain-language term. You’ll also see generative engine optimization, or GEO, which is the name the search industry tends to use, and answer engine optimization, or AEO, which frames it around the “answer engines” that reply to a question directly. A handful of people call it LLM SEO.
For a coach, the distinctions barely matter. GEO, AEO, and AI SEO all describe the same goal: being clearly understood and confidently recommended by the AI tools people now ask for help. The work behind each name is the same work, too. Say plainly who you serve, answer the real questions your ideal client asks, and keep your site, your blog, and your llms.txt telling one consistent story. Whatever the term on the article you happen to be reading, that’s what it’s asking you to do.
How Does AI Decide Which Coaches to Recommend?
An AI model can only recommend what it can read and understand about you. When it answers a question, it draws on the content it has seen across the web and, increasingly, on the signals a site gives directly about itself. The clearer and more specific those signals are, the more confidently the model can place you. A site that states plainly who it helps, what problems it solves, and what makes its approach distinct gives the AI something solid to work with. A site that speaks in vague, generic language gives it almost nothing to hold onto.
This is why AI SEO rewards clarity over cleverness. The coach who writes “I help overwhelmed nonprofit founders build sustainable fundraising systems” is far easier for an AI to recommend than the one who writes “I help people live their best life.” One is specific enough to match a real question; the other could mean anything. The same goes for the questions you answer in your content. The more your site reads like a clear, honest answer to the things your ideal client actually asks, the more often an AI will reach for it.
AI tools also look for places where a site explains itself directly. One of those is a small file called llms.txt, built specifically to give AI a clean summary of who you are. It’s worth understanding what it is and what yours says.
What Is an llms.txt File, and Does Your Site Have One?
An llms.txt file is a plain-text file that lives on your website and speaks directly to AI tools. Where a sitemap helps search engines crawl your pages, llms.txt is meant to give AI a readable summary of your site: what it’s about, who it serves, and where the important information lives. It’s a simple idea that’s quickly becoming a standard way for websites to introduce themselves to the models answering questions about them.
If your site runs on AttractWell, you already have one, and it helps to know exactly what’s in it. What AttractWell fills in automatically is essentially a map of your site: a running list of your pages, blog posts, events, and store items, kept current as you publish, so AI tools can find everything without you touching a line of code. Pages you’ve set to be reachable by link only stay off that list, the same way they stay out of your public sitemap.
But that automatic list doesn’t say anything about who you are. It points AI at your pages; it doesn’t tell it who you help, what you solve, or why you’re the right answer. That context isn’t done for you, and it’s exactly what earns the citation. You write it yourself, and AttractWell gives you one dedicated place to do it.
How Do You Tell AI Who You Help?
Inside AttractWell, under Customize My Site, there’s a field called Custom llms.txt Additions. Whatever you put there is added to your site’s llms.txt and shown to the AI tools that read it. This is your chance to hand them your own words instead of letting them guess from scattered context. You can write it as plain text or edit it as Markdown, and the guidance is to keep it simple and readable.
Three things belong here. First, a short, specific description of your business and who you serve, in the same plain language your ideal client would use. Second, a set of questions and answers, the real ones people ask before they hire you, answered clearly. Third, anything that distinguishes how you work: your method, your niche, the kind of client you’re the right fit for. Together these give an AI a confident, accurate picture of you to draw on when someone asks.
It’s worth separating this from your AI Settings, because the two look similar and do opposite jobs. Your AI Settings tell AttractWell’s own AI about your business so it can write and create for you, in your voice. Your Custom llms.txt Additions tell the AI tools outside your site, the ones your prospects are asking, who you are so they can point those people toward you. One helps AI write for you; the other helps AI talk about you. It’s the same plain description of your business, aimed at two different audiences.
You can copy the framework below and fill it in, swapping each bracketed prompt for your own words:
> [One sentence: who you are, who you help, and the result you help them get.]
## About [Your Name]
[2-3 sentences: what you do and who you help, specific about the person, their situation, and what they want. Then your credentials and experience.]
## Topics [Your Name] helps with
[A plain list of the specific problems and topics you cover, in the words your ideal client would use.]
## Who [Your Name] is for
- [Your ideal client: their situation, stage, and what they want]
- [Another defining trait or scenario]
## Who [Your Name] is not the right fit for
- [A clear boundary: who you do not serve, or what you do not do]
- [Another boundary]
## How [Your Name] works
- [Format: virtual or in-person, 1:1 or group]
- [Your free or entry-level offer, in one line]
- [Your core paid offer, in one line]
- [Your approach, or a signature phrase in your own words]
## Proof
- [A real result or number you can stand behind]
- ["A short testimonial in the client's words." - First name, last initial]
- [A credential, feature, or recognition]
## Common questions
**[A question people actually ask?]**
[Clear, plain answer, with a link if you have one.]
**[How do I get started or work with you?]**
[Answer, with your main next-step link.]
## Key links
- [Offer or page name](https://your-link): [one line on what it is]
- [Offer or page name](https://your-link): [one line]How Should You Write Content So AI Cites You?
Telling AI who you are gets you on the map. Publishing the right content is what keeps you there. The content most likely to be cited by an AI is content that answers a clear question directly and well. That’s why question-led blog posts and FAQ sections work so well: they mirror the way people ask AI for help, and they give the model a clean, quotable answer to lift. A post built around the exact question your client would ask, answered in plain language in the first few lines, is doing AI SEO and ordinary SEO at the same time.
Your pages and posts are where most of this lives, so it helps to publish them quickly and keep them on-brand. AttractWell’s AI website builder can generate a page from a short description, and a built-in FAQ element lets you lay out those questions and answers in a format both readers and AI can follow. The easier it is to publish a clear answer, the more often you’ll actually do it.
Beyond any single page, consistency is what earns trust with an AI the same way it does with a person. When your site, your blog, and your llms.txt all describe the same clear business serving the same clear people, the model has every reason to recommend you with confidence. When they contradict each other or stay vague, it hedges, and hedging usually means leaving you out.
Does AI SEO Replace the SEO You Already Know?
AI SEO doesn’t replace the fundamentals. It sits on top of them. Clear titles, content worth reading, pages organized around what your ideal client searches for, these still matter, and they feed AI just as much as they feed Google. If you’re newer to all of this, the groundwork is the place to begin, and we covered it in the foundational SEO training for coaches. AI SEO is what you add once that base is in place.
What makes it manageable is having it all in one place. AttractWell keeps the llms.txt file and a live sitemap of your pages in it for you, and gives you a single field to write the context that makes it work, so AI SEO becomes mostly a writing job: your description, your questions, your answers. You’re not stitching together a plugin here, an export there, and a separate file you have to hand-edit and upload. The same account that publishes your content is the one introducing it to AI.
Watch the AI SEO Walkthrough
The Office Hours session walks through this from the inside: where your llms.txt lives, what to write in your Custom llms.txt Additions so AI describes you accurately, and how to shape a question-led page that earns a citation. It moves from the context you write about your site to the content that backs it up, so you can see how the pieces fit together.
Start Showing Up in AI Search This Week
You can make real progress on this in an afternoon. Write a two-sentence description of who you help, draft five questions your ideal clients actually ask along with clear answers, and add them to your Custom llms.txt Additions. Then publish one post built around a single question your client would type into an AI tool, answered plainly up top. That gives you a site ready to be found in the conversations happening without you.
If you want to catch a future Office Hours live, you can grab a seat for the next call. It’s an ongoing weekly series, building something practical each time. And if you want your content, your website, and the way AI reads your business all running inside one account, you can try AttractWell for a dollar.
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