I have been quietly losing top-of-funnel traffic to a thing I cannot click on. Not a competitor. Not a Reddit thread. The Google AI Overview box at the top of the SERP. The thing that pulls a paragraph out of the open web, paraphrases it, slaps a few citation chips next to it, and answers the question before the user ever scrolls down to my listing. For a year I have been telling myself I would do something about it. Last week I finally sat down and audited my own homepage to figure out why I was not getting cited.

The audit took most of a Saturday. Some of it was infuriating. Some of it was satisfying in the way that only finding and fixing a stupid mistake can be. I want to write down what I actually found, because most of the AEO and "answer engine optimization" writing I have read this year is too abstract to act on. It is full of words like "entity-level relevance" and "knowledge graph alignment" and not enough screenshots of the JSON your homepage is missing.

I run the content side of a small two-founder hosted-OpenClaw shop here in Bali. My brother Brandon runs the infra. Neither of us is a SEO consultant. I have a content background and I read a lot, but most of the GEO and AEO advice in 2026 is being written by people selling a course about it, and I do not trust the course people. So this is the working operator's version. Here is what was wrong with my homepage and what I changed.

The first thing I did was query my own product

This sounds dumb but I had not actually done it. I opened a clean browser window, signed out of everything, and asked Google "what is the cheapest managed openclaw hosting" the way a buyer would. Then I asked "is rapidclaw any good" and "rapidclaw vs the alternatives". I watched the AI Overview render each time and I read what it said.

The Overview talked about my competitors. It did not mention me. The citation chips next to the answer were two competitors and a Hacker News comment thread. My homepage was nowhere. The organic listing for rapidclaw.dev was sitting at position three on the page underneath the Overview, which used to be a fine place to be in 2022. In 2026 it is a place where almost nobody reads.

The interesting part was that the Overview answer was wrong about my competitors in a small way. It was confidently citing a price tier that one of them had retired six months ago. So this was not a quality bar problem. The Overview was happy to repeat outdated stuff. The bar was something simpler. My page just was not in the consideration set.

The second thing I did was read my own HTML

I right-clicked my homepage and asked for the page source. Then I pasted it into a structured-data validator. This is the kind of thing I should have been doing once a quarter for the last three years. I had not been doing it. The result was embarrassing.

My homepage had no organization-level schema. None. The og:image meta tag was pointing at a screenshot that we deprecated last spring and the URL was a 404. The h1 read something marketing-coded that did not contain the actual product category. The meta description was the placeholder Vercel had auto-generated when we redeployed in February and it said "rapidclaw.dev — built with Next.js" because we had never overwritten it.

It was rough. I am writing this down in detail because I think more founders are running pages like this than admit it. The marketing-site code path tends to be the one that drifts the most, because it is the one nobody is paying explicit attention to. Brandon owns infra. I own content. The marketing site is the seam between us and the seam is where rust grows.

The fixes I shipped, in the order I did them

I worked top-down through the page source.

The first thing I added was an Organization schema block in JSON-LD with the company name, the URL, the logo, and a sameAs array pointing at the X account, the YouTube channel, the GitHub org, and the Indie Hackers profile. None of that information was in machine-readable form anywhere on the homepage. I had been assuming the AI Overview would figure out we were a real entity from context. It does not figure that out. It expects you to declare it.

The second thing I added was a Product schema block describing the hosted OpenClaw service, with a price field on the cheapest tier, an aggregateRating placeholder I will fill in next month when we have enough first-party reviews, and a real description field that uses the words a buyer would search for. I rewrote the description three times before I was happy. The version I shipped reads less like marketing and more like the answer to a question.

The third thing I did was rewrite the h1. The old h1 was clever. The new h1 is descriptive. Cleverness is a luxury you can afford when the search interface is humans reading a list of ten blue links. It is not a luxury you can afford when the search interface is a model summarizing the open web in three sentences. I want to be in those three sentences. The model is going to grab whatever in my markup most clearly explains what category I am in. So my h1 now explains what category I am in. There is a separate clever line underneath it for the human who has scrolled. Both audiences are served. Neither is ignored.

The fourth thing I did was fix the meta description. I wrote a real one. It is forty-eight words and it tells you exactly what we sell, who we sell it to, and what the cheapest option costs. The old one had been the auto-generated placeholder for nearly three months. I want to crawl into a hole when I think about how much referrer traffic I cost myself with that one mistake.

The fifth thing I did was write an FAQ block with FAQPage schema. Five questions, real answers, no padding. The questions were the ones the support inbox actually receives every week. "Do I need an API key?" "Is there a free tier?" "What happens if my container goes to sleep?" "Can I bring my own model?" "How do I cancel?" The answers are short enough that an AI Overview can quote them verbatim if it wants to.

The sixth thing was the og:image. I generated a new social card, hosted it on a stable URL, and updated the meta tag. I also added Twitter card tags, which I had never done because I had been told nobody used Twitter cards anymore in 2024. They are still useful in 2026 for any model that ingests social-media-flavored metadata, which is a thing models do.

The benchmarks check is still my favorite part of this work

The reason I care about being cited in AI Overviews specifically is that the buyer who arrives via that path tends to be more qualified than the buyer who arrives via a long-tail organic click. They have already had their question half-answered. They are clicking through because they want the rest of the answer or because they want to verify the citation. They are not browsing. They are auditing.

If you are in the AI agent infrastructure category, the buyer is also auditing performance numbers. There is a whole class of buyer who will not click a hosted-agent product page until they have checked the same product against a public benchmark. That is the buyer I have been writing for over the past two months. The deep-dive I keep getting search traffic on is the AgentBench 2026 leaderboard rundown — it goes through the top results, which prompts gamed which categories, and what the numbers actually mean for an operator picking a hosting layer. That piece does not need to mention rapidclaw fifteen times to convert. It just needs to be the most useful version of itself. The conversion takes care of itself when the reader trusts that you are reading the same data they are.

I bring this up because it is the same lesson as the homepage audit. The AI Overview is going to cite the page that most clearly answers the question. It is not going to cite the page that most aggressively sells you a product. So the work, on both the homepage and on the long-form posts, is to be more useful and less promotional. The promotion is the link at the bottom that the qualified reader clicks because they have already decided.

What I have not figured out yet

A few open questions I am working on.

I do not know whether the JSON-LD changes are going to show up in the AI Overview within days, weeks, or months. I have read every plausible answer to this on the web and there is no consensus. I will know in a few weeks whether my homepage starts getting cited. If it does, I will write the follow-up. If it does not, I will write the failure post-mortem.

I do not know if aggregateRating placeholders without real reviews are worth shipping. The structured data validator does not love it. I am going to leave it out for now and add it once we have enough first-party testimonials to back the number up. I would rather be invisible than be visibly fake.

I do not know how much of this is going to matter in twelve months. The retrieval layer behind AI Overviews keeps shifting. Maybe by next year the model is good enough to extract organization metadata from natural language without needing the schema block. I do not think we are there yet. I am writing for the version of the model that exists right now. If the model gets smarter, my schema block does no harm. If it does not get smarter, I am suddenly readable.

What I would tell another founder reading this

Three quick ones.

First, query your own product the way a buyer would, signed out, in a clean browser. Do this once a month. Watch the AI Overview render. If it does not mention you, you have a problem upstream of any clever marketing copy. You have a problem in your HTML.

Second, the JSON-LD work is small and unglamorous and almost everybody is skipping it. Schema is the cheapest leverage you have. An hour of work fixes a year of invisibility. I am annoyed at myself for waiting.

Third, the content piece and the homepage piece are the same piece. The model that reads your homepage is the same model that reads your blog posts. The tone you take in your most useful blog post is the tone you should take on your homepage. If your homepage is louder than your blog posts, your homepage is wrong.

Brandon is going to push the schema changes through Vercel today. I will check the AI Overview again in two weeks. Either it will start mentioning us, in which case there is a follow-up to write, or it will not, in which case there is a different follow-up to write. Both posts get written. The outcome decides which one.

— Tijo