Docs
Shiftrank sits between your visitors and your origin. Setup is DNS only — there is nothing to install and no application code to change.
Setup
-
01
Verify the domain
Add the TXT record shown in the dashboard. Verification confirms you control the zone before any traffic moves.
TXT _shiftrank.example.com "shiftrank-verify=<token>" -
02
Move traffic through the proxy
Point the hostname you want measured at the proxy. Requests are forwarded to your origin unchanged while you are in observe mode.
CNAME www.example.com proxy.shiftrank.ai -
03
Confirm the hop
A proxied response carries the Shiftrank header. If it is missing, DNS has not propagated yet.
curl -sI https://www.example.com | grep -i x-shiftrank
Machine-readable surfaces
- /llms.txt
- Served at your apex once enabled. Authored in the dashboard, versioned per change.
- /robots.txt
- Kept as your origin serves it unless you opt into managed AI directives.
- Accept: text/markdown
- Content negotiation returns a markdown rendering of the requested page to clients that ask.
Shiftrank publishes its own at /llms.txt.
Guides
- Doing AEO at the edge, without rewriting your application
Why answer engine work keeps stalling in the backlog, and how a reverse proxy in the request path delivers structured data, llms.txt, and crawler control without an application change.
- Tracking AI referral traffic in GA4 and beyond
The referrers to segment on, why the numbers look small, why they undercount, and how to connect a referral back to the page the model actually cited.
- An AEO checklist for SaaS companies
Twenty-two checks across access, content, structure, and measurement — ordered so the diagnostic work happens before the writing, and grouped by who on your team actually owns each one.
- robots.txt for AI crawlers: a directive-by-directive reference
Every AI user agent worth naming, what each one controls, the precedence rules that decide which directive wins, and the wildcard mistake that quietly removes sites from AI answers.
- How to measure AI crawler traffic (and why your analytics shows zero)
Google Analytics cannot see GPTBot. Here are the four ways to capture AI crawler traffic, what each one costs you, and the five metrics worth reporting once you have the data.
- llms.txt: what it is, what it is not, and how to write one that earns its place
A practical guide to the llms.txt format — the correct structure, the mistakes that make it useless, and an honest account of what adoption actually looks like today.
- GPTBot vs ChatGPT-User vs OAI-SearchBot: which one is reading your site
OpenAI operates three distinct crawlers with three different purposes. Blocking the wrong one costs you citations; allowing the wrong one costs you leverage. Here is how to tell them apart in your logs.
- What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
Answer engine optimization is the practice of making your content retrievable, parseable, and quotable by AI systems that answer questions directly instead of returning a list of links.