Don’t block your AI visibility
🥹Competitors are about to accidentally remove themselves from the citation pool, and more!
Hello! You've arrived at What Actually Works 🤓
We break down the real strategies, decisions, and plays that actually move the needle in your marketing, and here it for today.
🥹 Competitors are about to accidentally remove themselves from the citation pool
Cloudflare’s new Content Signal Policy, becoming the default on September 15, gives publishers more control over how AI systems can access their content. The goal is understandable: prevent content from being used for AI training without permission.
The problem is that many site owners may assume they’re only blocking AI training.
In some configurations, they could also be restricting the crawlers responsible for search visibility and AI citations, turning a content protection decision into a discoverability problem.
The risk isn’t blocking AI training. It’s blocking discovery.
The distinction between training bots and search crawlers sounds straightforward.
In practice, it isn’t always.
Google has already confirmed that it doesn’t use llms.txt, so relying on that file alone doesn’t control how Google accesses content. At the same time, broader crawler settings can unintentionally affect bots responsible for indexing pages that later appear in Google Search and AI-generated answers.
That’s why this isn’t just a compliance check.
It’s a visibility check.
Your biggest opportunity may come from someone else’s mistake
AI systems can only recommend content they’ve successfully discovered.
If competing sites accidentally remove themselves from that crawlable pool after September 15, they aren’t simply losing rankings. They’re reducing the number of sources available to AI systems for the topics they previously covered.
That creates an opportunity for brands whose content remains fully accessible.
Sometimes increasing visibility isn’t about publishing more.
It’s about remaining available while others quietly disappear.
Run one technical audit before everyone else does
Before assuming your configuration is correct, review exactly which crawlers are affected by your Cloudflare bot settings.
Don’t stop at category names.
Confirm the individual bots included within each rule and verify that the search and AI platforms you care about can still access your content.
This is the type of issue that’s rarely diagnosed correctly because the symptoms look like a content problem. Citation visibility declines, AI mentions slow down and rankings weaken, while the real cause sits inside a technical setting few content teams ever think to inspect.
That’s why it’s valuable to monitor traditional search visibility and AI visibility together. Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit tracks Google Search, AI Overviews, AI Mode and platforms such as ChatGPT from one dashboard, making it much easier to spot when a simultaneous decline points to a technical issue rather than a content one. You can try free for 7 days.
The brands that benefit most from this change may not be the ones publishing the most content. They may simply be the ones that remain fully crawlable while competitors unknowingly remove themselves from the citation pool.
Partnership with Omnisend
Everyone’s talking about AI. Here’s how three email marketing experts are actually using it.
What do experienced email marketers actually ask AI when real campaign decisions are on the line?
In this free 56-minute session, Jimmy Kim, founder of eCom Email Marketer, and Chase Dimond, co-founder of eCom Email Marketer, open up their workflows and show the prompts they use to review performance, pull useful reports, and decide what to do next.
You’ll learn:
- How to spot missed opportunities hiding in your campaign data
- The exact prompts Jimmy and Chase use to pull reports, analyze campaigns, and take action
- Where AI genuinely improves email marketing and where human judgment still needs to lead
The session was recorded in ChatGPT, but Omnisend works with Claude too, so the same workflows carry over.
New to Omnisend? It’s an email and SMS marketing platform used by more than 150,000 ecommerce brands, generating an average of $79 for every $1 spent.
Migration is free, takes up to five business days, and plans cost up to 35% less than Klaviyo’s.
Watch the full 56-minute session, no signup required.
🐥 Tweet Worth Saving
Thanks for being part of the WAW team 💃 We’d love to know if this was helpful so we can continue playing it smart with the right strategies.