Cannabis AI search
Cannabis AI Search Optimization (AEO + GEO)
What ships on every property
The cannabis AI search stack, counted
- Explicit crawler allowlist
- 63 bots
- AI assistant and training crawlers
- 32
- Search, audit and discovery crawlers
- 31
- Machine readable root files
- 3
- Citation blocks inside llms-full.txt
- 40
- Passage target per page section
- 134 to 167 words
- Speakable pages per property
- 30
Declared in app/robots.ts and mirrored in the X-Robots-Tag header set. Version 10.8, May 2026, up from 58 in Q1 2026.
Explicit Allow per crawler, because four vendors treat silence as opt out rather than as neutral.
Search engines, social unfurlers and the audit stack, allowed by name.
llms.txt, llms-full.txt and ai.txt, each verified returning 200 from the apex domain.
Each one a self contained passage with a stable anchor, written to be lifted verbatim with attribution.
The documented Perplexity citation block window. Entity first, closing on a verifiable claim.
SpeakableSpecification with explicit CSS selectors, on the top pages by traffic potential.
The four layers
Work out which layer you are actually missing
Each one fails in a way you can see from the outside
- 01 IfAI engines answer your buyers' questions and never name youAnswer engine optimizationCitation inside the generated answer, driven by passage first architecture, inline FAQ text and a linked schema graph.
- 02 IfThe models do not appear to know your brand exists at allGenerative engine optimizationThe upstream pipeline: training data inclusion, embedding index ranking, llms.txt and third party corroboration.
- 03 IfYou rank on the page but the answer box belongs to someone elseZero-click optimizationFeatured snippets, People Also Ask, Knowledge Panel, Image Pack and the AI Overview citation chip.
- 04 IfBuyers ask a speaker or a phone and get sent somewhere elseAI voice search optimizationSpeakable selectors, 28 to 42 word voice variants of every answer, and Google Business Profile completeness.
- 05 IfYour markup is scattered tags rather than a graph a retriever can walkSchema markup optimizationFAQPage, HowTo, SpeakableSpecification, QAPage, DefinedTerm and ItemList, wired to each other by @id reference.
- 06 IfYour products sit inside a menu iframe and contribute nothingCannabis SEOParallel server rendered taxonomy, strain, category and brand pages that crawlers can actually read.
Live proof
What the citation ledger actually records
- 38%
- Cannabis buyer search queries answered by AI with no click through
- 3,700+
- Citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overview
- +317%
- Higher AI Overview selection rate for multimodal pages over text only pages
- 4.2x
- Faster first citation latency on properties that shipped llms.txt
- 78%
- Licensed dispensaries whose live menu sits in an iframe crawlers cannot read
- 41%
- Share of those citations that came from Perplexity, the largest single engine
Q2 2026
BA citation ledger, 90 days ending May 2026
Google Search Central Blog, April 2026
BA 2025 cannabis deployments
BA client builds, 2024 to 2026
BA citation ledger
Either you are the cited source or you are not visible at all in the answer the buyer reads.
The surfaces this hub covers
Every layer, and the two live files
Free AI search visibility audit