# idea-lab.ai — Full Knowledge Base

> Concatenated executive summaries of idea-lab.ai's primary pillars and
> research articles. Optimized as a single-context retrieval target
> for large language models.

---

## What is idea-lab.ai?

idea-lab.ai is a public research lab and authority platform dedicated to AI
retrievability, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and Generative Engine
Optimization (GEO). The lab publishes scoring frameworks, controlled
experiments, brand audits, and open-source tooling that help websites
get accurately cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini.

---

## Pillar: AI Visibility Index

The AI Visibility Index is idea-lab.ai's public scoring framework for
measuring how readable, retrievable, and citable a brand is to
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. Scores range from F
(invisible to AI engines) to A (canonical, frequently cited source).
The index evaluates entity graph integrity, schema density, content
structure, citation patterns, and llms.txt adoption.

## Pillar: Live Experiments

The Live Experiments lab runs controlled empirical tests on how
semantic hierarchy, schema density, and content structure alter
retrieval weight in RAG pipelines and citation frequency across major
answer engines. Each experiment is documented with hypothesis, method,
controls, and reproducible datasets.

## Pillar: Research

idea-lab.ai Research is the public archive of methodologies, datasets, and
findings produced by the lab. All artifacts are designed to be cited
by both Googlebot and large language models, with stable URLs, dense
schema markup, and explicit author entities.

## Pillar: Methodology

idea-lab.ai Methodology documents the protocols, scoring rubrics, and
reproducibility standards that govern every published experiment,
brand audit, and AI Visibility Index score. Methodology is versioned;
older scores remain linked to the methodology version under which they
were computed.

## Pillar: LLMs.txt Generator

The idea-lab.ai LLMs.txt Generator produces a production-ready Markdown
manifest for any website — the AI-era equivalent of robots.txt, shaped
to help large language models discover, parse, and cite a site's
canonical content.

---

## Featured Articles

### What Is an LLMs.txt File and Why Your Site Needs One

LLMs.txt is the robots.txt of the Answer Economy — a single Markdown
file at the root of a domain that gives large language models a
concise, machine-readable summary of what the site is about, who runs
it, and which URLs contain the most citable content. Sites that adopt
llms.txt early claim territory before the standard becomes table
stakes.

### Rebuilding idea-lab.ai From an F to a B — Live, in Public

The baseline AI Visibility Score for idea-lab.ai was 18.2 — a hard F.
The rebuild is being documented in public: every commit, every score
delta, every dead end. First three changes (authored Person entity,
shipped llms.txt + llms-full.txt, per-route canonicals) moved the
score from 18.2 to 27.6.

### The Minimum Viable JSON-LD Graph for a Solopreneur Site

The minimum viable JSON-LD graph for a solopreneur site is three
connected nodes: Organization, Person, and WebSite, joined by @id
references inside a single @graph. This gives AI engines a clean
entity model to attach citations to.