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SEO Swansea

AI Search Optimisation in Swansea

AI search optimisation is how we make sure your Swansea business shows up when people ask AI platforms for help. Whether someone's chatting with ChatGPT, browsing Google AI Overviews, asking Microsoft Copilot, checking Perplexity, talking to Claude, or using Apple Intelligence — we make your business the one they find. It brings together three emerging disciplines: Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), and LLM SEO. Right here at SEO Swansea, we put all three to work for businesses across Swansea Bay, Mumbles, Morriston, the SA1 Waterfront, and the wider Gower Peninsula.

Quick Answer

AI search optimisation makes sure your Swansea business appears in AI-generated answers — not just the old-fashioned list of blue links. It involves structuring your content so large language models can pull it into their responses, setting up technical standards like llms.txt and schema markup, and keeping an eye on citations across ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. Businesses that get this right now build a first-mover advantage as AI search steadily takes over from traditional link-clicking for more and more local queries here in Wales.

You're looking at the most thorough guide to AI search optimisation you'll find for any Swansea business. We cover what AI search actually is, how each major platform works under the bonnet, why local businesses need to act now rather than later, and the exact technical and content strategies we deploy for our clients. Whether you run a restaurant on Wind Street, a trades business in Morriston, or a professional services firm at SA1 Waterfront, this guide explains how to make AI work for you — not your competitors.

What Is AI Search Optimisation?

In plain terms, AI search optimisation is the set of strategies and technical steps that help your website appear in AI-generated search results. Traditional SEO focuses on climbing a list of ten blue links. AI search optimisation focuses on being cited, quoted, or recommended inside an AI-generated answer — a fundamentally different game.

The discipline brings together three overlapping fields:

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)

AEO is about structuring your website content so that answer engines can pull out clear, direct responses to the questions people ask. Answer engines include Google's Featured Snippets, voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, and AI search tools like Perplexity. Getting it right means writing in a declarative, question-and-answer style with clear entity definitions, factual statements up front, and structured data that maps your content to specific questions.

Here's a practical example. For a Swansea plumber, AEO means writing content that directly answers "How much does a boiler replacement cost in Swansea?" with a factual price range in the opening sentence, backed up by structured data that identifies the business as a local plumbing service. When Copilot or Google AI Overviews encounters that query, the plumber's content becomes the citation source.

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)

GEO zeroes in on the generative layer — the part of an AI system that stitches answers together from multiple sources. Research from institutions including Princeton and Georgia Tech shows that content packed with real statistics, quotes from credible experts, and citations to authoritative sources is picked up far more often in generative search results. GEO is essentially about reverse-engineering those citation patterns so your content makes it into the generated answer.

LLM SEO

LLM SEO is specifically about optimising for the large language models behind tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. That means making sure your site is crawlable by AI-specific bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot), setting up the llms.txt standard, and writing content with clear entity relationships that models can parse during retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

All three disciplines share a common thread: making your content machine-readable, factually structured, and rich in entities so that any AI system — whether it uses a search index, a knowledge graph, or a retrieval pipeline — can confidently identify your business as a relevant and trustworthy source.

The AI Search Landscape in 2026

The search landscape has splintered. Back in 2024, Google held north of 90% of search traffic. By mid-2026, AI-powered search tools have carved out a real share of informational and local queries. If your Swansea business depends on being found online, you need to understand each platform and how it works.

ChatGPT Search (OpenAI)

OpenAI runs two crawlers: GPTBot for training data and OAI-SearchBot for live search retrieval. ChatGPT's built-in search feature now handles millions of queries every day. When someone asks "best accountant near Swansea University Bay Campus," the system fetches fresh results through OAI-SearchBot and blends them with the model's existing knowledge. Sources show up as inline links in the response.

For Swansea businesses, ChatGPT search matters because it handles nuanced local queries that traditional search routes to map packs. A question like "which electrician in Sketty can install an EV charger this week?" might return a direct recommendation drawn from your Google Business Profile, website content, and review signals.

Google AI Overviews

Google AI Overviews (formerly the Search Generative Experience) now appear for a hefty proportion of UK searches. These AI-generated summaries sit above the traditional organic results and pull content from indexed pages. The big difference from Featured Snippets is that AI Overviews stitch together information from multiple sources — so your content might appear alongside a competitor's in a single combined answer.

For a Swansea restaurant, that means a query like "best seafood restaurant Mumbles" might produce an AI Overview naming three places, pulling review data, menu highlights, and pricing from each one. Being one of those cited sources takes structured content that Google's AI can confidently extract from.

Microsoft Copilot

Copilot is baked into Windows 11, Microsoft Edge, Bing, and Microsoft 365. It uses Bing's search index combined with OpenAI models to answer questions. For Swansea businesses, Copilot punches above its weight because it's woven into the operating system and productivity tools that many local businesses already use day-to-day. When a business owner asks Copilot in Edge to "find an SEO agency in Swansea," the results come from Bing's index — which makes Bing Webmaster Tools optimisation a vital piece of the puzzle.

Claude (Anthropic)

Anthropic's Claude uses ClaudeBot as its web crawler. Claude's search capabilities have grown enormously through 2025 and 2026, with real-time web access now built into Claude.ai and the API. Claude tends to favour well-structured, factual content and is particularly attuned to entity definitions and authoritative sourcing. If you produce educational or technical content, Claude's citation patterns reward depth and accuracy.

Perplexity

Perplexity works as an "answer engine" that serves up sourced responses with inline citations. Its crawler, PerplexityBot, indexes content specifically for retrieval when generating answers. What sets Perplexity apart is its transparent citation model — every claim in a Perplexity answer links back to a source URL. That makes it the most trackable AI search platform for businesses watching their citations.

For Swansea businesses, a Perplexity query like "best place to stay near Gower Peninsula" will return an answer citing specific accommodation websites. If your content has clear factual claims, location data, and entity markup, Perplexity is more likely to point people your way.

Apple Intelligence

Apple Intelligence, built into iOS 18 and macOS, handles on-device queries and passes tricky ones to its search partners. Apple blends Siri's voice search legacy with generative AI smarts. For local Swansea businesses, Apple Intelligence matters because of iPhone market share in the UK: when a tourist strolling along Swansea Marina asks Siri to "find a coffee shop nearby," Apple Intelligence now generates contextual recommendations rather than just dropping a pin on the map.

Why Swansea Businesses Need AI Search Now

The Swansea business landscape is shifting under our feet. The city's economy spans tourism along the Gower Peninsula, professional services in the SA1 Waterfront development, retail on Oxford Street and Wind Street, healthcare, education linked to Swansea University and Swansea University Bay Campus, and a growing tech sector. Every single one of these sectors is already being shaped by AI search.

Here are some real-world scenarios that are happening right now, just down the road:

The pattern's clear: AI search platforms favour businesses whose websites contain structured, factual, entity-rich content. Businesses leaning on vague marketing copy, images without alt text, and unstructured pages are quietly being excluded from AI-generated answers.

The first-mover advantage here is real and it compounds. AI models build knowledge graphs and citation preferences over time. A Swansea business that establishes itself as a trusted source now will be much harder to displace next year and beyond — much like the early adopters of traditional SEO built domain authority that latecomers spent years trying to match.

How AI Models Find and Cite Sources

To get this right, it helps to understand how AI models actually discover and choose their sources. The process is quite different from traditional search engine crawling and ranking, and it's worth getting your head around.

Crawling and Indexing

AI platforms run dedicated web crawlers that index content for two separate purposes: collecting training data and fetching live search results. Training crawlers (like GPTBot in training mode) sweep the web periodically and fold content into the model's base knowledge. Search crawlers (like OAI-SearchBot) grab fresh results at query time, a bit like traditional search engine crawlers but with different priorities when it comes to what they look for.

AI crawlers care about text far more than design. They extract headings, paragraph text, list items, table data, and structured data (JSON-LD, microdata). Content buried inside JavaScript-rendered widgets, locked up in images, or hidden behind client-side interactions often gets missed completely.

Citation Patterns

Research into how AI models cite sources reveals several consistent patterns. Models are more likely to cite content that:

Entity Recognition

AI models build internal entity graphs from the content they crawl. When your website consistently identifies your business as an entity — with a name, location, service type, and relationships to other entities (your city, your industry, your clients) — the model can confidently reference you in relevant answers. Inconsistent naming, missing location signals, or woolly service descriptions make it harder for models to connect your business to the right queries.

For a Swansea business, this means every page should reinforce your entity signals: your business name, your location within Swansea, the services you offer, and your relationship to local landmarks and areas (Mumbles, Gower, SA1). This isn't keyword stuffing — it's entity clarity, and it's what AI models need to cite you with confidence.

Structured Data Signals

JSON-LD structured data acts as a machine-readable layer that AI models parse alongside your visible content. While traditional SEO used schema markup mainly for rich snippets in Google, AI search treats it as a primary signal for entity identification and relationship mapping. A LocalBusiness schema with accurate address, geo-coordinates, service areas, and opening hours gives AI models the structured facts they need to recommend your business.

The llms.txt Standard

The llms.txt file is a proposed standard that gives AI crawlers a structured summary of your website. It sits at the root of your domain (for example, yourdomain.com/llms.txt) and tells large language models what your site is about, which pages matter most, and how to credit your content.

Think of it as a companion to robots.txt. Where robots.txt controls access (which bots can crawl which pages), llms.txt provides context (what the site is, what it offers, and where the best content lives). Together, they form a complete communication layer between your website and AI systems.

What llms.txt Contains

A well-crafted llms.txt file includes your business name and description, your primary services, your key content pages with brief summaries, your preferred citation format, and any important context about your expertise or authority. The format uses Markdown with specific heading conventions that AI parsers recognise.

How We Implement llms.txt

For every client, we create a tailored llms.txt that accurately represents their business, services, and expertise. We include geographic identifiers (Swansea, specific neighbourhoods, postcodes), service categories mapped to schema.org types, and links to their most authoritative content. We then monitor AI search results to check that the information in llms.txt is actually being picked up by the major platforms.

AI Search Discovery Pipeline

The following diagram shows how llms.txt fits into the AI discovery pipeline, from your website all the way through to a cited search result:

Your Website robots.txt llms.txt AI Crawler GPTBot ClaudeBot PerplexityBot LLM Processing AI Search Result (with citation) AI Search Discovery Pipeline

Each stage in this pipeline is an optimisation opportunity. Your website content needs to be well-structured. Your robots.txt and llms.txt need to welcome and guide AI crawlers. The crawlers need to be able to parse your content cleanly. The LLM processing stage needs to match your content to relevant queries. And the final result needs to cite your business with accurate attribution.

AEO vs Traditional SEO

Answer Engine Optimisation and traditional SEO share some DNA, but they differ in their goals, techniques, and how you measure success. Understanding these differences helps Swansea businesses decide where to put their marketing budget.

Traditional SEO vs AI Search / AEO Traditional SEO AI Search / AEO Keywords Entities Backlinks Citations Rankings Answers CTR (Click-Through Rate) Brand Mentions → → → →

Keywords vs Entities

Traditional SEO revolves around keyword research — finding the phrases people type into Google and building pages around them. AEO shifts the focus to entities: named things with properties and relationships. Instead of chasing the keyword "plumber Swansea," AEO identifies your business as an entity of type Plumber located in the entity Swansea, providing the service Emergency Plumbing. AI models think in entities, not keywords.

Backlinks vs Citations

In traditional SEO, backlinks from other websites signal authority. In AI search, citations within AI-generated answers play a similar role. A citation is when an AI model names your business or links to your content in its response. Earning citations means being the most structured, factual, and relevant source on a topic — not necessarily the most linked-to.

Rankings vs Answers

Traditional SEO measures success by position in search results: position 1 gets the lion's share of clicks, position 10 gets crumbs. In AI search, there's no list of ten results. There's one generated answer that may cite one, two, or three sources. You're either in the answer or you're not. That binary outcome makes AI search optimisation higher-stakes than the old ranking battles.

CTR vs Brand Mentions

Traditional SEO tracks click-through rate: the percentage of impressions that turn into website visits. In AI search, many people get their answer without clicking through to any source at all. The value shifts from clicks to brand mentions — being named as a trusted source builds awareness and credibility even when nobody visits your site. For Swansea businesses, success is measured partly by how often AI tools recommend your brand, not just how many people click your link.

Content Strategy Differences

AEO content strategy differs from traditional SEO in several practical ways. Every page should open with a declarative first paragraph that directly states what the page is about — this is the text AI models are most likely to extract. FAQ sections with FAQPage schema provide ready-made question-answer pairs that models can extract word for word. Comparison tables, pricing information, and step-by-step processes should use HTML tables and ordered lists rather than prose, because AI parsers handle structured formats far more reliably.

GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation

Generative Engine Optimisation is the most forward-looking branch of AI search optimisation. While AEO focuses on being pulled out as a direct answer, GEO focuses on being woven into AI-generated narratives. When Google AI Overviews or ChatGPT stitches together a response from multiple sources, GEO determines whether your content makes the cut.

How Generative Models Select Sources

Generative models use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to combine their base knowledge with fresh search results. During this process, the model retrieves candidate documents, scores them for relevance and authority, extracts key claims, and blends them into a coherent answer. Your content needs to survive each stage of this pipeline.

Research has pinpointed several factors that increase your chances of being included in generative results:

Citation Optimisation Techniques

For Swansea businesses, citation optimisation means making sure your content contains unique, verifiable claims that AI models need to attribute. A Swansea solicitor who publishes "conveyancing in Swansea typically completes in 8-12 weeks, with Land Registry fees of approximately £270 for properties under £300,000" provides exactly the kind of specific, citable data that AI models surface in answers. Compare that with vague copy like "we offer competitive conveyancing services" — the AI has nothing concrete to work with.

We implement GEO for our Swansea clients by auditing existing content for citation potential, adding quantitative data points, structuring claims as extractable facts, and making sure each page contains at least one unique insight that no competitor offers. This blend of depth and specificity is what separates content that gets cited from content that gets skipped.

robots.txt for AI Crawlers

Your robots.txt file controls which bots can access your website. For AI search optimisation, this file is the gatekeeper. If you block AI crawlers in robots.txt, your content simply can't appear in AI-generated answers. It really is that straightforward.

AI Crawlers You Should Allow

Here are the AI crawlers you should make sure are allowed in your robots.txt if you want to show up in AI search results:

How We Configure robots.txt

For our Swansea clients, we configure robots.txt to explicitly welcome all beneficial AI crawlers while keeping appropriate blocks on admin areas, staging environments, and duplicate content. We also set crawl-delay directives for aggressive bots that might slow things down, especially for smaller Swansea businesses on shared hosting.

Many default WordPress and website builder setups block some or all AI crawlers without you even knowing. This is one of the most common issues we uncover during our SEO audits in Swansea — businesses unknowingly blocking GPTBot or ClaudeBot and wondering why they never turn up in AI search results.

The Access vs Training Decision

Some businesses worry about letting AI crawlers use their content for model training, and that's a perfectly fair concern. The good news is that you can block training crawlers while allowing search crawlers where the platform supports it, giving you the best of both worlds. Your content appears in AI search results without contributing to training data. OpenAI, for instance, respects robots.txt blocks on GPTBot for training while using OAI-SearchBot separately for search. We help each client make this call based on their content, competitive situation, and comfort level.

Structured Data for AI Search

Structured data has always mattered for SEO, but for AI search it becomes essential. JSON-LD schema markup provides AI models with a machine-readable layer of information on top of your visible content. While a human reads your paragraph about opening hours, an AI model reads your OpeningHoursSpecification schema and extracts the same information with perfect accuracy.

Essential Schema Types for Swansea Businesses

LocalBusiness

Every Swansea business should implement LocalBusiness schema (or a more specific subtype like Restaurant, LegalService, or Plumber) with complete address, geo-coordinates, service area, opening hours, and contact details. This schema is how AI models pin down your business as a local entity. Include areaServed with Swansea and your specific service areas.

FAQPage

FAQPage schema wraps your frequently asked questions in a format that AI models can extract as direct answers. When someone asks ChatGPT "how much does a haircut cost in Swansea," and your salon has a FAQ with that exact question and a specific price answer marked up with FAQPage schema, your content becomes the most extractable source. We add FAQPage schema to every service page and location page we build for clients.

HowTo

HowTo schema structures step-by-step processes in a format made for AI extraction. A Swansea electrician who marks up "How to Request an EICR Certificate in Swansea" as a HowTo with individual steps, estimated time, and costs provides exactly the structured process data that AI models surface in procedural queries.

Service with Offer

Service schema with embedded Offer objects describes what you provide and how much it costs. This is especially valuable for AI search because pricing queries ("how much does X cost in Swansea?") are among the most common commercial queries handled by AI assistants. Providing structured pricing data makes your business the definitive source for those answers.

Schema Consistency

One thing that often gets overlooked is consistency. Your schema must match your visible content exactly. If your schema says you're open until 6pm but your website text says 5:30pm, AI models lose confidence in your data and may not cite you at all. We audit schema-content alignment as part of every technical SEO project we deliver in Swansea.

AI Search Readiness Checklist for Swansea Businesses

Here's a ten-point checklist to see whether your Swansea business is ready for AI search. Each item is a concrete optimisation that directly contributes to your visibility in AI-generated answers.

✓

robots.txt allows AI crawlers — Check that GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are not blocked in your robots.txt file. Test with each bot's user-agent string.

✓

llms.txt file is live — Create and publish a well-structured llms.txt at your domain root with your business name, services, key pages, and preferred citation format.

✓

Declarative first paragraphs — Every key page opens with a factual, declarative sentence that states what the page is about. Use the format "[Topic] is [definition/fact]" to maximise AI extractability.

✓

LocalBusiness schema implemented — Complete JSON-LD schema with business name, address (including SA postcode), geo-coordinates, service area covering Swansea, opening hours, and contact details.

✓

FAQPage schema on service pages — Each service page includes at least five FAQs with FAQPage schema. Questions should mirror the natural language queries your customers ask AI assistants.

✓

Entity consistency across the site — Your business name, location, service types, and key attributes are named identically across every page, schema block, and external listing.

✓

Quantitative data on key pages — Pricing, statistics, timescales, and other numerical data are present on your most important pages. AI models prefer citable numbers over vague claims.

✓

Structured content formats — Use HTML tables for comparisons, ordered lists for processes, and definition lists for terminology. These formats are more reliably extracted by AI parsers than walls of prose.

✓

Google Business Profile optimised — Your GBP listing is complete, verified, and consistent with your website data. AI platforms including Copilot and Google AI Overviews pull heavily from GBP data for local queries.

✓

Citation monitoring in place — You're actively tracking when and how AI platforms mention your business. Checks across ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews should run at least monthly.

If your business passes fewer than five of these ten checks, you've got significant AI search exposure risk. Grab a free SEO audit and we'll assess your AI search readiness as part of our full review.

Our AI Search Optimisation Service

At SEO Swansea, we offer a dedicated AI search optimisation service built specifically for local businesses in the Swansea area. Our approach brings together technical implementation, ongoing monitoring, and content strategy — all under one roof.

Phase 1: AI Search Audit

We start with a thorough audit of your current AI search visibility. That means testing your business across ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews for the queries that matter to you. We dig into your robots.txt configuration, check for existing structured data, review your content for AI extractability, and benchmark you against your local competitors. You get a clear report showing exactly where you stand and what needs doing.

Phase 2: Technical Implementation

Based on the audit, we put the technical foundations in place. That includes creating your llms.txt file, configuring your robots.txt for AI crawlers, rolling out comprehensive JSON-LD schema across your site (LocalBusiness, FAQPage, Service, HowTo, and other relevant types), and making sure your sitemap is submitted to Bing (which powers Copilot) as well as Google.

Phase 3: Content Optimisation

We restructure your existing content so AI models can extract from it easily. Every service page gets a declarative opening paragraph, an FAQ section with schema, quantitative data points, and clear entity relationships. We add structured comparison tables, pricing details, and process descriptions in formats that AI models can parse reliably. Any new content we write is built from the ground up with AI search in mind, following GEO best practices for citation optimisation.

Phase 4: Monitoring and Iteration

AI search optimisation isn't a set-and-forget job. We provide ongoing monitoring of your citations across all major AI platforms, track changes in AI search behaviour that affect your visibility, and refine content and technical elements as the landscape evolves. Monthly reports show your citation frequency, which queries trigger your mentions, and our recommendations for what to do next.

Ready to get your Swansea business showing up in AI search?

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Frequently Asked Questions About AI Search Optimisation

What's AI search optimisation all about?

AI search optimisation is about making sure your website works well with the AI tools people already use to find local businesses. When someone asks ChatGPT, Copilot, or Perplexity a question about services in Swansea, those AI platforms pull answers from web content. We structure your site so it gets picked up, understood, and recommended. It brings together Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), and LLM SEO into one joined-up approach.

How's AEO different from regular SEO?

Traditional SEO is all about ranking pages in a list of blue links — keywords, backlinks, that sort of thing. AEO shifts the focus to getting your business mentioned as a trusted source inside AI-generated answers. That means optimising for entities, structured data, and clear factual content rather than just chasing click-through rates. There's plenty of overlap, but AEO needs a different kind of content strategy — one built around direct, citable answers.

Can you explain GEO in plain English?

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. In simple terms, it's about making your content the kind that AI systems actually want to include when they write an answer. Think Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search results, and Perplexity answers. Research from places like Princeton shows that content with real statistics, expert quotes, and solid entity references gets picked up far more often. GEO is the art of writing content that ticks those boxes.

Should Swansea businesses be thinking about this already?

They should, yes. AI search tools already handle a good chunk of local queries in Wales. When someone asks Copilot to recommend a plumber in Morriston or ChatGPT for somewhere nice to eat in Mumbles, the AI pulls from what it can find on the web. If your site isn't set up for AI extraction, your competitors who are set up will get the mention instead. Getting in early gives you a compounding advantage that's genuinely hard for latecomers to claw back.

What on earth is llms.txt?

Think of llms.txt as a friendly introduction your website gives to AI crawlers. It sits at yourdomain.com/llms.txt and tells language models what your business is about, which pages matter most, and how to credit you properly. It works a bit like robots.txt but for context rather than access control. We'd recommend every Swansea business has one as part of their AI search setup.

Will AI search optimisation hurt my Google rankings?

Not at all — it actually helps. The techniques involved, things like better structured data, clearer writing, and stronger entity signals, are exactly what Google rewards too. Google AI Overviews draw from the same index as organic results, so when you optimise for AI extraction you're usually giving your traditional rankings a boost at the same time.

When will we start seeing results?

The technical improvements — structured data, content tweaks — can be picked up by crawlers within days. Showing up consistently in AI-generated answers usually takes four to twelve weeks as models re-index your content and update their knowledge. Most Swansea businesses we work with see measurable changes in citation monitoring within the first month.

How much does AI search optimisation cost?

We offer AI search optimisation starting from a one-off audit and implementation at a fixed fee, with optional monthly monitoring if you want ongoing tracking. The price depends on the size of your site, how many service areas you cover, and how competitive your market is. Pop over to our pricing page or grab a free AI search audit and we'll put together a quote tailored to your business.

AI Search Optimisation Is the Future of Local SEO in Swansea

The shift from traditional search to AI-generated answers isn't something on the horizon — it's happening right now. Swansea businesses that get their websites ready for AI search in 2026 will build the citation authority and entity recognition that compounds over time. Those that wait will find it increasingly expensive and difficult to break into AI-generated answers once competitors have already staked their claim.

Whether you're a restaurant owner on Wind Street wanting Copilot to recommend you, a trades business in Morriston needing ChatGPT to cite your services, or a professional firm at SA1 Waterfront targeting Google AI Overviews for commercial queries, the fundamentals are the same: structured content, technical accessibility, entity clarity, and ongoing monitoring.

At SEO Swansea, we combine deep technical know-how in AI search with local knowledge of the Swansea business landscape. We understand the queries your customers are asking, the AI platforms they're using, and the technical implementations that get your content into AI-generated answers.

Have a look at our other services to see how AI search optimisation fits into a broader SEO strategy:

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