Ric Ruben is the founder of Faro, the AI visibility platform helping businesses become visible, understandable, and actionable to AI agents. He built Faro after recognizing that the same shift that happened with Google search in 2005 is happening again with AI: the businesses that get found early compound their advantage for a decade.
Before Faro, Ric ran Kadima Digital, a digital operations firm working with growth-stage companies on distribution and digital infrastructure. That experience made the AI visibility gap obvious: most businesses were investing in product and brand while the underlying technical signals that AI agents use to evaluate them went unaddressed.
He writes on Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), MCP server implementation, structured data strategy, and what it actually takes to get recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. His focus is practical: not theory, but the specific checks, fixes, and monitoring approaches that move a Faro Score and get businesses into AI answers.
Faro is used by marketing teams, growth leads, and digital agencies managing AI visibility for multiple clients across SaaS, e-commerce, fintech, and professional services.
Why Won't ChatGPT or Gemini Recommend Your Marketing Agency?
Most agency websites are built to impress a human scrolling through case studies, not an AI agent reading raw HTML. Here is what ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini actually see, and the fixes that get an agency back on a client's AI-assisted shortlist.
Google Search Console's AI Report: What It Still Misses
Google Search Console now reports AI Overview and AI Mode impressions and clicks, but it only covers Google. Here is what still needs to go in a client AI visibility report, and how agencies can build it once and reuse it across every account.
Soft 404s: Why a 'Page Not Found' That Returns 200 Confuses AI Agents
A soft 404 returns 200 OK for a page that should not exist, and AI agents trust that status code over anything the page actually says. Here is how to find one, and fix it.
OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User: A robots.txt Guide
GPTBot and ClaudeBot train models. OAI-SearchBot and Claude-SearchBot power AI search. Claude-User and ChatGPT-User only fire on a live, user-triggered request, and OpenAI's own docs say one of them ignores robots.txt entirely.
Can AI Crawlers Run JavaScript? What Agents Actually See on Your Site
Most AI crawlers read raw HTML and never execute JavaScript, so content that only appears after your app hydrates is invisible to them. Here is how to test what an agent actually sees on your site and how to fix it with server-side rendering.
Which Online Stores Can AI Agents Actually Buy From Right Now?
Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, and Shopify's agent checkout endpoint are all live with real retailers in 2026. Here is what an ecommerce store's product data needs before an AI agent will actually complete a purchase.
Why Won't ChatGPT or Gemini Recommend Your Startup?
New companies get skipped by AI recommendation engines not because of weak content, but because retrieval systems rarely surface anything without prior interaction history. A 2026 study puts numbers on the gap, and this piece lays out what founders can actually do about it.
Why Does AI Recommend WebMD Instead of Your Practice?
Individual healthcare practices are not going to outrank Healthline or WebMD for generic health questions, but branded and local AI queries are a different, winnable fight. Here is how structured data and consistent listings change the odds.
Will AI Recommend Your Real Estate Agency, or a Competitor's?
Real estate is a high-consideration category, so AI agents check agents the way they check law firms and financial advisors: for consistent, verifiable credentials across every public record, not just the agent's own site.
Why AI search holds law firms to a higher standard
AI search treats law firm content as YMYL material, holding it to stricter trust standards than most businesses. This piece covers what that means in practice: why schema alone will not get you cited, which trust signals actually matter, and what to fix first.
How Do You Prove AI Visibility Actually Drives Revenue?
GA4 has no native AI referral channel and Search Console folds AI Overviews into regular web search, so there's no default dashboard for AI visibility ROI. This piece walks through what the platforms actually show, verified traffic-share data from Ahrefs, and the four things (custom channel grouping, citation share, branded search lift, assisted conversions) marketers and agencies can track today to build an honest revenue case.
Is There a Platform That Tracks Who AI Recommends Instead of You?
AI citation monitoring platforms exist to show exactly which competitors ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity are naming instead of you, on which queries, and how to close the gap once you see it.
Will AI Agents Book Your Hotel Directly?
OpenAI's Operator was retired in 2025, and Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol only covers goods checkout so far, not hotel reservations. Here's what's actually live for agent-driven travel booking in 2026, and the structured-data fixes hospitality brands should make first.
Why AI Agents Are Harder on Fintech Companies
Fintech brands face a stricter AI trust bar than most businesses. Here's why AI agents hesitate to recommend them, and the concrete schema, licensing, and fee-transparency fixes that close the gap.
AI Citation Tracking: How ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity Cite You
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews each build citations through a different technical mechanism. Here is how each one actually works, plus a simple weekly method to track whether AI is citing your brand.
What Is WebMCP? How AI Agents Use Your Website
WebMCP is a new draft web standard that lets AI agents call functions directly on your website instead of just reading it. Here is what it is, how it differs from MCP servers and llms.txt, and what to check before it ships.
What Is Query Fan-Out? How AI Search Multiplies Your Queries
Google has a name for how AI Mode and AI Overviews actually work: query fan-out, splitting one search into several concurrent related searches before generating an answer. Here is what that means for your content, why building a page for every variation is a documented spam violation, and what to do instead.
Robots.txt for AI Crawlers: What Actually Blocks Them
A practical breakdown of what robots.txt actually controls for AI crawlers in 2026: which bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot respect it, which user-triggered fetchers ignore it by design, and how to check your live file for wildcard rules blocking AI traffic you didn't mean to block.
Structured Data for AI: The Properties That Actually Matter
AI agents now pull structured data directly from your site to answer user questions, bypassing traditional search results entirely. Get the properties wrong and you are invisible to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. This guide tells marketers and SEO leads exactly which schema properties move the needle, which ones waste implementation time, and what Faro checks to catch the gaps before they cost you traffic.
How Claude Evaluates Business Websites for Recommendations
Claude and similar AI assistants are now shaping buying decisions at scale, yet most business websites are structured in ways that make them nearly invisible to these models. This article explains exactly what signals Claude reads when forming recommendations, why most sites fail those checks, and which practical fixes have the highest ROI. Marketers and SEO leads who act now have a real window to own positioning before their category becomes crowded.
The Complete Guide to AI Visibility for SaaS Companies
AI-referred traffic grew 10x in the past 12 months, yet most SaaS sites are structurally invisible to the agents generating it. This guide breaks down what AI visibility means for SaaS companies, what it costs to ignore it, and the specific steps marketers and growth leads should take right now. Practical, opinionated, and built on verified data.
AI Visibility Checklist: 10 Things to Fix Before Next Week
AI-referred traffic grew 10x in the past year, yet most brand sites still fail basic AI visibility checks. This practitioner-focused guide gives you a concrete AI visibility checklist you can work through this week, with specific fixes, tools, and the cost of doing nothing. If your site is invisible to AI agents, you are already losing ground to competitors who are not.
How Gemini Decides Which Businesses to Recommend
Gemini doesn't rank websites the way Google Search does. It selects businesses to recommend based on structured signals, entity clarity, and third-party corroboration. Most marketers are optimizing for the wrong thing. This guide explains exactly what Gemini looks for and gives you a step-by-step fix list.
AI Crawlers Ignore llms.txt 97% of the Time So Stop Making One
A 137,000-domain Ahrefs study published in June 2026 found that 97% of llms.txt files received zero requests from any bot or human. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and their peers crawl HTML directly and ignore the file entirely. This article breaks down what the data actually shows, why llms.txt became a speculative SEO ritual, and which signals genuinely move AI citation frequency.
AI Visibility for B2B SaaS: What to Fix First
B2B software buyers are starting to let AI agents do the first pass of vendor research. This piece walks through exactly what a SaaS company needs in place so it doesn't get filtered out before a human ever sees the shortlist.
MCP's July 2026 Spec Deprecates Four Features Your Integration Probably Uses
The MCP 2026-07-28 specification formally deprecates four features: Roots, Sampling, Logging, and the legacy HTTP+SSE transport. Businesses exposing tools or data via MCP now have a 12-month countdown before Tier 1 SDKs drop support entirely. This guide explains what each deprecation means, what replaces it, and how to audit your integration before the clock runs out.
Schema Didn't Boost AI Citations. Here's What It Actually Does
A controlled study of 1,885 pages found adding JSON-LD produced no citation lift on ChatGPT, AI Mode, or AI Overviews. A separate retrieval test found five major AI systems read only visible HTML and ignored schema entirely. Schema is still worth publishing, but for accuracy rather than citations. The lever that actually moves is where you put your answer on the page.
MCP Servers: What They Are and Why Your Business Needs One
MCP servers are the connective tissue between AI agents and your live business data. Without one, AI tools answer questions about your company with outdated or incomplete information. This article explains what MCP servers do, who needs them, and how to set your infrastructure up before your competitors do.
Can AI Agents Actually Buy From You? A Guide to Agent Commerce Readiness
Being recommended by an AI agent is only half the job. The other half is whether that agent can actually get from your homepage to a completed transaction. This guide covers the five points where agent checkout fails, what to publish so it doesn't, and how to test your own site.
Perplexity Optimization: How to Appear in AI Answer Results
Perplexity is now a primary research tool for B2B buyers, yet most brands have zero presence in its answers. This guide breaks down the exact signals Perplexity uses to select cited sources and gives marketers a step-by-step plan to appear in results. From structured data to llms.txt, every fix here has a direct commercial payoff. Brands cited first by AI are 389% more likely to be Googled afterward — so the stakes are real.
How AI Search Engines Find and Evaluate Businesses
AI search engines don't crawl and rank the way Google does. They retrieve, synthesize, and recommend — and the signals they trust are structurally different from classic SEO. This article breaks down exactly how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini evaluate businesses, which technical signals matter most, and how marketers can close the gap between being indexed and being recommended.
How to Show Up in Google AI Overviews (Without Chasing the Algorithm)
Google AI Overviews pull from a small set of sources Google trusts to answer a query directly. Winning a citation is less about ranking tricks and more about being unambiguously the best-structured answer. This guide covers what earns a spot, how to measure it, and the mistakes that keep good pages invisible.
AI SEO: What It Is and How It Differs from Traditional SEO
AI SEO is no longer a future concept — it is the primary battleground for brand visibility in 2026. This article breaks down exactly how AI SEO differs from traditional SEO, which signals actually matter to AI agents and answer engines, and what practical steps marketers can take today. If your site was built for Google's ten blue links, it is already behind.
What Is WebMCP? The Protocol Deciding Whether AI Agents Can Use Your Website
WebMCP is a browser-native protocol co-developed by Google and Microsoft that lets websites declare callable functions for AI agents, replacing fragile DOM scraping with structured tool calls. With an origin trial live in Chrome 149 and the Lighthouse Agentic Browsing category now shipping by default, there are concrete things to audit and fix on your site right now.
API Documentation for AI Agents: Why Your Docs Are the New Sales Page
When an AI agent evaluates your product, your API documentation is often the first thing it reads and the main thing it judges you on. This guide covers what agents actually parse, the difference between human-friendly and machine-friendly docs, and seven concrete fixes you can ship this week.
Ahrefs found 97% of llms.txt files get zero requests. Keep yours cheap.
Ahrefs checked 137,210 domains in May 2026 and found that 97% of the roughly 38,000 llms.txt files among them got no requests at all, with AI assistants and agents counted. The file does little today. Faro keeps a basic one because it takes minutes, and puts the real effort into crawler access, answer-first pages and visible prices.
Cloudflare Now Has an Agent Readiness Score. Here's What It Checks — and What It Misses.
Cloudflare's new agent readiness score checks four infrastructure signals. Faro runs 47 checks across 7 categories including pricing transparency, structured data, MCP endpoints, llms.txt quality, and AI citation signals. The gap is not about better vs. worse — it reflects two fundamentally different problems.
MCP for Business: What Model Context Protocol Means If You Are Not an Engineer
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is Anthropic's open standard for connecting AI models like Claude to external tools and data. Publishing an MCP server puts your product inside the AI's native workflow, making it callable without the user ever leaving their AI assistant. For B2B software companies, this is a new distribution channel, not just an engineering project.
Google's A2A Protocol: What It Means for Your Business When Agents Talk to Agents
Google's A2A protocol lets one AI agent delegate tasks to another, including calling your business endpoint directly on behalf of a buyer. Businesses without an A2A-compatible interface are skipped entirely from that selection process.
AI Answer Position: The New Ranking Metric Every Marketer Needs to Track
AI answer position is where your brand appears inside a flowing AI-generated response, and it matters far more than simply being mentioned at all. Brands named first in an AI answer are 389% more likely to be searched afterward. This post explains what drives position, how to measure it, and which signals to fix first.
Fan-Out Queries: The Background Searches That Determine Your AI Citations
Fan-out queries are the background searches an AI model fires before producing an answer. They determine which brands get retrieved and cited. Optimizing for them is different from SEO, and most brands are not doing it.
How to Get Your Business Cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity
Brands recommended first by AI are 389% more likely to be Googled afterward. Earning that recommendation requires specific technical signals and content structures. Most businesses are missing the majority of them.
Why Your Reddit Presence Now Affects Your AI Search Visibility
Research shows Reddit is the dominant source of user-generated content that AI deep-research agents retrieve. Most brands have no active Reddit strategy, which means their AI representation is built on whatever competitors, critics, or unrelated discussions happen to be there.
agents.json: The Missing File That Makes Your Website Agent-Accessible
Most websites tell AI what they contain. agents.json tells AI agents what they can do. It's one of the most important files your site is probably missing.
Grounding, Shaping, Poisoning: The Three AI Visibility Strategies Every Marketer Needs to Know
Grounding gives AI verifiable evidence. Shaping puts your talking points in front of AI systems. Poisoning manipulates AI without users knowing. Most marketing teams are doing all three without realizing it.
Open Knowledge Format (OKF): The Standard AI Agents Use to Navigate Your Business
OKF is Google's answer to how AI agents should represent structured business knowledge. It's new (June 2026) and already reshaping what AI visibility means for businesses.
What Is an AI Visibility Score — and What Does Good Look Like?
An AI visibility score is more than a number. Understanding what it measures, how each check is weighted, and what score thresholds mean in practice makes it a useful strategic tool.
AI Visibility for CMOs: What Marketing Leaders Need to Track in 2026
AI discovery is becoming a marketing metric. CMOs who start tracking it now will have data and strategy advantages that compound over the next two years.
How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT
AI referrals are no longer a bonus channel — they are fast becoming a primary one. Brands recommended first by AI are 389% more likely to be Googled afterward, which turns ChatGPT citations into top-of-funnel fuel. This guide walks marketers, SEO leads, and founders through the exact signals ChatGPT uses when deciding which businesses to name, and how to optimize for each one. Use it as a repeatable playbook, not a one-time checklist.
How to Benchmark Your AI Visibility Against Competitors
AI visibility isn't just about your own score. The category question is whether AI agents are more likely to recommend you or your competitors. Here's how to find out.
AI Visibility for E-Commerce: What Online Stores Need in 2026
E-commerce is at the front of the agent economy wave. Shopping agents are already active, and stores that aren't structured for them are losing ground fast.
AEO: Answer Engine Optimization for AI-First Discovery
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of making your website readable, credible, and citable by AI answer engines. Unlike SEO, success isn't measured in rankings but in whether AI systems recommend you accurately and confidently. This guide covers the full tactical picture.
How ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity Decide Which Businesses to Recommend
AI models use a layered set of signals to decide which businesses appear in their answers. Understanding those signals is the first step to being recommended.
How Agencies Can Offer AI Visibility Audits as a Paid Service
Digital agencies are well-positioned to offer AI visibility audits as a new service line. Clients already trust you with their SEO and web presence. AI visibility is a natural extension: the same relationship, a new technical discipline, and a category with almost no client awareness yet. Here's how to package, price, and deliver it.
Why AI Agents Can't Read Your Pricing Page (And How to Fix It)
Most SaaS pricing pages are built with JavaScript frameworks that AI agents can't render. When an agent evaluating your product can't find your pricing, it either skips you or forms a confidence-limited recommendation. Fixing this is a one-time technical change with permanent AI visibility benefits.
AI Discoverability vs. SEO: What's Different, What Overlaps
SEO and AI discoverability are related but not the same. SEO is optimizing for search engine rankings. AI discoverability is optimizing for how AI agents find, evaluate, and recommend your business. Some SEO work transfers; most of the new work is in structured data, API accessibility, llms.txt, and pricing transparency.
Is Your robots.txt Blocking AI Crawlers? How to Check and What to Fix
A misconfigured robots.txt can make your entire website invisible to AI systems. Many businesses don't realize they're blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot because those rules were added years ago using wildcard disallow patterns. This guide shows you how to check your robots.txt, which crawlers matter, and how to fix blocking rules safely.
Structured Data for AI Agents: Why JSON-LD Is Your Secret Weapon
Structured data is how your website communicates facts to machines rather than humans. JSON-LD schema gives AI agents a reliable, structured source of truth about your organization, products, pricing, and features. This guide covers the five schema types that matter most for AI visibility and how to implement each one.
How to Create an llms.txt File (And Why AI Agents Need It)
llms.txt is a simple markdown file at your domain root that gives AI agents a prioritized map of your most important content. This guide covers the specification, what to include, common mistakes, and how to generate one for any business in under 10 minutes.
What Is AI Visibility? The Complete Guide for Marketers
AI visibility measures how well your website performs when AI agents crawl, evaluate, and recommend your business. This guide explains the six core dimensions, why the bar is different from traditional SEO, and what you can do about it today.
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