What Happens When You Optimize a Browser Game for AI Search Engines, Not Just Google

Most SEO advice is still written for one audience: Google's crawler. But a growing share of search now happens inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot and those engines don't rank pages, they extract and cite them. Here's what changed when I optimized AgentSlash, a free instant play HTML5 game, for both.

The baseline: what Google already wanted

AgentSlash already had the standard technical SEO basics in place — a canonical tag, OG/Twitter cards, and VideoGame/FAQPage/BreadcrumbList schema. That's the foundation traditional search has rewarded for years, and none of it is wasted on AI engines either - schema especially carries over almost one-to-one, since it's structured enough for an AI crawler to extract cleanly.

What AI search actually wants on top of that

Three things changed in how I wrote the page copy itself:

1. Lead with the direct answer. Every section now opens with a one-sentence answer before any elaboration - "AgentSlash is a free browser game where you slice rogue AI agents out of the air" comes before any scene-setting, not after it.
2. Question-format headings. "What is AgentSlash?" and "How do I play AgentSlash?" as literal H2s, matching how people actually phrase questions to ChatGPT and Perplexity.
3. An /llms.txt file and a robots.txt check. AI crawlers - GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended need to be explicitly allowed; plenty of default robots.txt setups block them by accident.

The part that surprised me
FAQ schema turned out to matter more for AI extraction than I expected going in. It's structured Q&A by design, which happens to be exactly the shape an AI answer engine wants to lift and cite and visible on-page FAQ text that matches the schema (not just schema with no matching copy) seems to earn more trust from these engines than either alone.

Measuring it
There's no Search-Console equivalent yet for "did ChatGPT mention me," so I'm tracking it manually: a running list of 10 questions a player might actually ask an AI assistant, run through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot once a month, logging whether AgentSlash shows up. Free tools like Otterly.AI do this automatically if you'd rather not run it by hand.

If you want to see the actual page this is all describing: instantgames.in/games/agentslash/