Emilio GarciaManaging Partner, Boundify · Demand Gen Advisor

The First Step to AI Visibility: Are You Crawlable?

20 Jun 2025 · 2 min

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1:34

In this segment of the talk, Emilio Garcia presents the first element of his CLARITY framework—"C" for Crawl. He explains that the crawl step is a manual audit where businesses verify whether their brand or website appears in search engine and AI model results when the business name is queried. The audit checks for accidental blocks such as restrictive robots.txt rules, distinguishing between intentional blocks and outdated knee‑jerk decisions. Garcia notes that user search behavior is shifting: people still use Google but increasingly ask questions to AI assistants and other platforms. By testing client queries against AI models, his team uncovered visibility gaps where businesses were not being surfaced, highlighting the importance of ensuring crawlability for modern AI‑driven discovery.

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All right. So essentially the framework we have created is called CLARITY. So it's an acronym and we'll just walk through each part. Please ask questions because I don't want it to be a monologue of me just like going through here. But yeah, so essentially the C is for crawl. So this is a very manual part of the thing, but it's just going in and testing to see, does something come up whenever you type in your business name? I guess, does your business even, even surface? And if it doesn't surface, then it's trying to check and make sure there's nothing blocking that. So it's the same thing you would do with Google. Can I actually be crawled by Google, by Bing, by the various bots that are out there? Or do I have something in my robots.txt that's preventing me from being able to be crawled by any of these AIs? And if so, has that been done intentionally or was that just something that was done out of a knee-jerk reaction a year and a half ago of like, I don't want these things to get my information, so I'm going to close them out. And now it's like, I forgot about it. Yeah. And now it's like, maybe actually I do want them to get my information. People are using this legitimately in their day-to-day of like things that they're asking. You have conversations with people and you learn like, oh wow, they changed their search habits entirely. They're still going to Google at some stage, but they're asking questions somewhere else or getting information somewhere else. And as we took the models and started testing things for our clients, that's when we started to realize them.