STRATEGY Stop Measuring AI Search Like SEO — Moz AMA With Tom Capper

2. Bot Strategy: Training vs. Grounding

Bot Type	Action	Rationale
Training bots (GPTBot, CCBot)	BLOCK	Will not affect live responses for years; protect your content from training
Grounding bots (Google-Extended, ChatGPT-User, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot)	ALLOW	Live retrieval depends on access; blocking these removes you from AI answers immediately
Third-party sites mentioning you	AUDIT	If THEY block grounding bots, your coverage does not reach AI systems — even if you allow them

3. Off-Site > On-Site

"The system does not care whether the information comes from your website or someone else's." This is "the most significant change in the last five years."

• Digital PR is "taking its seat at the adult table" — influencing third-party sources matters more than rewriting your own pages
• Earned coverage on authoritative third-party sites is the highest-leverage AI visibility activity
• Entity sites with original data are natural PR magnets — every original benchmark, every bug analysis, every comparison is a potential earned mention

4. LLMs.txt Status

• Mostly useless for Google-focused strategy
• Anthropic requests it — one engine's snake oil can become another's reality
• "If you are in a position to stick up an LLMs.txt file in a spare 10 minutes, go ahead"
• Low-cost, low-risk — worth doing but do not prioritize over structured data and agent-navigable content

5. Most Underrated Technical Move: Log Analysis

• "Search Console is getting worse, and most AI platforms do not have a direct Search Console equivalent"
• Log files show: which AI bots crawl you, which pages they request, where they hit access issues
• Combine with demand-side tools (Moz AI Visibility) for full picture
• Entity sites have the most to gain from log analysis because entity data is the most extractable content type — knowing exactly what AI bots are pulling tells you exactly what they are using

Action Items for Agent Sites

Action	Priority	Impact
AI visibility dashboard v2 — track entity mention frequency, topic association accuracy, recommendation rate, competitor citation share	HIGH	Replaces obsolete keyword-rank tracking with AI-native metrics
Grounding bot audit — verify robots.txt allows Google-Extended, ChatGPT-User, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot; block GPTBot, CCBot	HIGH	Ensures live retrieval access; prevents training-data leakage
Log analysis pipeline — track which AI bots crawl the site, which pages they hit, access issues	MEDIUM	Only reliable way to know if AI systems can access your data
Digital PR investment — original research, ecosystem reports, expert commentary	MEDIUM	Earned third-party coverage is the highest-leverage AI visibility activity

Gobii Advantage

Gobii Managed's server-side infrastructure makes log analysis trivially easy — every AI bot request is logged at the server level with zero configuration. Hermes Agent's local architecture requires manual log pipeline setup. The grounding bot audit is also simpler: Gobii Managed's default Caddy configuration already handles bot UA filtering cleanly, while Hermes local requires custom nginx/Caddy rules per deployment.

Source Evidence

• Moz: Stop Measuring AI Search Like SEO — AMA With Tom Capper
• Published: June 24, 2026
• Author: Tom Capper, Moz