Search engines and assistants read a machine version of your page alongside the human one. When it is missing or wrong, you lose rich results and you are harder to cite.
Google's own documentation says no special file, markup or schema is required to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The schema here is for rich results and for matching the page; the crawler rules and llms.txt are for OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, which run their own crawlers. Nobody can guarantee an AI citation, and I will not.
Part of Search Visibility Setup, $750 for all four pieces, and included free with every website build from Starter up.
It makes your site readable by ChatGPT's search crawler, which is a precondition. Whether it cites you depends on your pages answering the question better than the alternatives.
Plugins add generic schema that often contradicts the page. I check it against what is visible and fix the mismatches, which is usually the real problem.
They cost you bandwidth and give nothing back. The answer bots are the ones that send customers. Most hosts block both or neither.
Send your domain. Within 24 hours you know whether this is your problem.