Appear in
every answer.

No — not at all. Human visitors continue to see your existing website exactly as designed: the same layout, design, interactions, and content. Appear only changes what AI crawlers receive. The experience for real people is completely untouched.

No code changes required. Setup is entirely DNS-level — you add one CNAME record pointing your domain through Appear's edge. Your CMS, frontend framework, hosting provider, and publishing workflow stay exactly as they are. Most teams are fully deployed in under an hour.

Appear classifies every incoming request at the edge in under 50ms using a combination of user-agent string matching, IP reputation data, and behavioral signals. We maintain a continuously updated list of known AI crawler signatures including GPTBot (ChatGPT), PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot (Anthropic), Google-Extended (Gemini), and others. When in doubt, the system defaults to the human response.

Appear is designed to complement SEO, not interfere with it. Googlebot (for traditional search) is treated as a human visitor and receives your normal site. The AI-facing layer is only served to AI assistant crawlers like GPTBot and PerplexityBot. Your canonical URLs, structured data, and existing rankings are unaffected. If anything, improved machine readability tends to support structured data quality.

Yes, instantly. If you ever want to disable Appear, you simply update or remove the CNAME record from your DNS provider. There is no migration, no data export, and no changes to your origin site required. DNS changes typically propagate in under 15 minutes.

Appear generates tailored response profiles for all major AI platforms: ChatGPT (GPTBot), Perplexity (PerplexityBot), Claude (ClaudeBot / anthropic-ai), Gemini (Google-Extended), and Bytespider (ByteDance / TikTok AI). Each system receives content formatted for how that specific AI processes and synthesises information. The crawler list is continuously updated as new AI platforms emerge.

Yes — this is exactly what Appear is built for. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) both require your content to be machine-readable and structured for AI synthesis. Appear handles the technical layer: serving clean, structured, AI-optimised content to each crawler. Your team can focus on content strategy while Appear handles the delivery infrastructure.

Both — and this is an important distinction. Appear reads your existing site content and generates structured, platform-specific representations for each AI system. This isn't simple reformatting: Appear writes citation-optimized content tailored to how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini each process and synthesize information. The generated content is grounded in your actual site — your brand voice, product positioning, and facts — but structured and expressed in the way each AI platform responds to best.

Appear works with any website that can be routed via DNS — which is essentially everything. We have tested and documented setups for Framer, Webflow, WordPress, Shopify, Next.js (Vercel and Cloudflare), and custom stacks. If your DNS provider supports CNAME records (all major providers do), you can deploy Appear regardless of your hosting or frontend framework.