Why is my traffic falling even though my rankings are stable?
Often because the answer now appears above the results. When a search engine or assistant answers directly, the click never happens, which is why impressions can hold while sessions drop. The response is to be the source that gets cited rather than the tenth blue link, which means structured, plainly stated, verifiable content.
Do AI crawlers need separate permission in robots.txt?
Yes. They read robots.txt like any crawler but use their own user agents, including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended. Many sites block them accidentally through a blanket rule or a security plugin. Allowing them is a decision, not a default, because it means assistants can read and quote your pages. We show you the change and you choose.
What is llms.txt and do I need one?
It is a plain-text file at your site root describing your business in language a machine can use directly: what you do, who you serve, where you work and how to reach you. It is an emerging convention rather than a mandated standard. It takes about twenty minutes to write and only helps if every line in it is true.
Does structured data actually help with AI search?
It helps because it states facts explicitly instead of leaving them to be inferred from prose. Both search engines and assistants read schema.org markup. Two rules apply: only mark up what is visible on the page, and only mark up what is true. Schema describing invisible content is cloaking, and schema describing things that never happened is fabrication.
Does social media affect AI visibility?
Indirectly, yes. Assistants and search engines build their picture of a business from the whole web, so profiles that match the site, listings with the same details, and links people actually share all help them recognise you as one consistent entity. A proper share card on every page also decides whether a posted link looks worth clicking. Posting more does not, on its own, make an assistant mention you.
Do you only report problems, or fix them too?
Both, depending on what you want. Every finding comes with the file or copy to fix it, ready to paste. Because Codexlava is a development team, we can also make the changes ourselves, on WordPress, Shopify or a custom site, rather than handing a list to someone else.
How long before this makes a difference?
Search and AI both move slowly. Expect roughly thirty days before anything looks different, so there is little point checking the week after. What you get immediately is a clear account of what was broken, what was fixed, and what assistants currently say about you, recorded word for word.
Is this a one-off project or an ongoing retainer?
It starts as an audit, because there is no sensible way to price the work before seeing what is wrong. The audit gives you a ranked list of findings and the files and copy to fix them. Whether that becomes ongoing depends on what we find and how much you want to hand over. We scope that together after the audit.