Your client's site is fast, accessible, and ranks fine on Google and ChatGPT has never heard of it. That's not an SEO problem. It's a machine-readability problem, and as the developer, you're the one who can fix it. This is the practical checklist I use, with copy-paste code.
Why this is now a developer's job
AI search systems (ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews) don't rank pages they retrieve and synthesize. A page enters the retrieval pool only if crawlers can fetch it, parse it, and extract unambiguous facts from it. Rendering strategy, structured data, crawl directives that's our layer, not the marketing team's.
Three failure modes cover most invisible sites: AI crawlers blocked in robots.txt, facts locked inside JavaScript or images, and zero structured data. All three are fixable in an afternoon.
Step 1: Stop blocking the crawlers (2 minutes)
