The 5 Quick Wins That Move a Startup from 30 to 60

Here is what 2,500+ startup audits actually look like when you sort them:

Below 25: 40% of startups. Missing almost everything. AI does not know they exist. 25-40: 30% of startups. Some basics in place, but incomplete. AI finds them inconsistently. 40-55: 20% of startups. Solid foundation. AI cites them for some queries. 55-70: 8% of startups. Strong infrastructure. AI cites them reliably. Above 70: 2% of startups. Comprehensive AEO. AI treats them as authoritative sources.

The cliff between 30 and 60 is where the leverage is. You are moving from "AI does not know I exist" to "AI cites me reliably." And the gap between those two states? Five specific things.

Not twenty things. Not a six-month content strategy. Five technical changes any developer can ship in a single sprint. We know because we have watched hundreds of startups do exactly this.

Impact: 8-12 points. Time: 20 minutes.

Create a file called llms.txt in your site's root directory. This is the single most underutilized AEO tool across the entire startup ecosystem.

``` # YourStartup

> One-line description of what you build.

## Product - Core Product: What it does (/product) - API: Developer documentation (/docs) - Pricing: Plans and features (/pricing)

## Resources - Blog: Technical articles (/blog) - FAQ: Common questions (/faq) - Changelog: Product updates (/changelog)

## Company - Founded: 2026 (YC W26) - Location: San Francisco, CA - Contact: hello@yourstartup.com ```

That is it. AI systems read this file to understand your startup without crawling every page. Without it, they are guessing from your marketing copy and cookie banners.

For Next.js: drop it in public/llms.txt. For Vercel: same thing. Deploys with your next push.

Impact: 5-8 points. Time: 15 minutes.

Without Organization schema, your startup is just text on a page. With it, you are a verifiable entity in AI knowledge systems.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "YourStartup",
  "url": "https://yourstartup.com",
  "logo": "https://yourstartup.com/logo.png",
  "description": "One sentence about what you do",
  "foundingDate": "2025",
  "founders": [{ "@type": "Person", "name": "Founder Name" }],
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "addressLocality": "San Francisco",
    "addressRegion": "CA",
    "addressCountry": "US"
  },
  "sameAs": [
    "https://twitter.com/yourstartup",
    "https://linkedin.com/company/yourstartup",
    "https://github.com/yourstartup"
  ]
}
</script>

Add a WebSite schema alongside it in the same @graph array. Two schema types. 15 minutes. You just crossed the first trust threshold in Claude's compound scoring.

Impact: 3-5 points. Time: 5 minutes.

We have audited startups built on Next.js, Nuxt, Remix, Astro, and every major framework. Almost none of them ship with AI-specific robots.txt rules. That means GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot get no signal about whether your content is available for citation.

Add this to your robots.txt:

``` User-agent: GPTBot Allow: /

User-agent: anthropic-ai Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended Allow: /

Sitemap: yourstartup.com/sitemap.xml ```

Five minutes. Your site just went from "silent on AI" to "explicitly welcoming AI crawlers." That is a signal. AI systems notice it.

Impact: 5-8 points. Time: 60 minutes.

A FAQ page with 15 real questions does three things at once: it creates 15 independent pieces of extractable content, it qualifies for Google Rich Results via FAQPage schema, and it matches the exact question-answer format AI assistants use for retrieval.

Write questions your customers actually ask. Not "Why is our product the best?" but: - "How much does [product] cost?" - "Does [product] integrate with Stripe?" - "What is the difference between [product] and [competitor]?" - "How long does it take to set up [product]?" - "Can I use [product] for [specific use case]?"

Use <details>/<summary> elements so the content is in the HTML source. Add FAQPage JSON-LD. Each answer should be 2-4 sentences - enough for AI to extract, not so much that the answer gets buried.

One page. 15 questions. 15 chances for AI to cite you. No other single page on your site will generate this much citation surface area.

Impact: 4-6 points. Time: 30 minutes.

Take your three most important pages - probably homepage, product page, and pricing page. Rewrite the headings from declarative to question format.

Before: "Enterprise Features" / "Pricing Plans" / "How It Works" After: "What enterprise features does [product] offer?" / "How much does [product] cost?" / "How does [product] work?"

This is not cosmetic. When someone asks ChatGPT "How does [your product] work?" - the AI is scanning for content with that exact structure. A heading that matches the query format gets extracted first.

Do this for your top 3 pages. Each heading. Each section. Takes 30 minutes. The match rate between your content and real AI queries jumps immediately.

The math: Five changes. Under 3 hours total. Average lift: 25-30 points. No budget. No agency. No waiting. Ship it this sprint.