AI
search optimization.
Your customers ask ChatGPT and Perplexity before they open Google. Whatever those engines answer is what your market hears. I work on what they say about you.
What changed
A growing share of buying questions now gets answered inside AI interfaces before a single click happens. Brands that get cited there get discovered. The rest drop out of the conversation, and no dashboard shows it happening.
AI search optimization is the work of changing that: making sure the engines writing those answers have something accurate to say about you, and a reason to say it. Some people call it generative engine optimization. Some call it AEO. The label keeps changing while the work stays the same.
GEO, AEO, AI SEO: which one is it
You will see generative engine optimization services sold under three or four names. They describe the same activity: getting a brand quoted, cited or recommended inside an AI-written answer instead of ranked below one.
I use AI search optimization because it is the term that stayed steady while the others spiked and faded. Demand for generative engine optimization peaked and has since fallen by more than half. That matters less for your marketing than it does for anyone selling you a fresh acronym every quarter. GEO vs SEO, in detail →
Visibility audit across AI engines
Run the prompts your buyers actually run, across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and AI Overviews, on a fixed schedule. Record three things per prompt: whether you appear, what is said about you, and which sources the answer pulled from. The third one tells you what to fix.
Entity and structure work
Models decide what you are before they decide whether to recommend you. That means consistent naming, structured data that agrees with the page, an About page a machine can parse, and the same facts about you appearing in the same shape everywhere. Contradictions get you left out, not corrected.
Content built for citation
A page that buries its answer in paragraph nine gets read and skipped. Answer-first structure, one question per heading, claims attributable to a named person. This is why a real author with a real biography outperforms anonymous content, in AI answers more than in Google.
Measurement that holds up
There is no rank tracker for this. Two people asking the same question get different answers. So measurement is a repeated panel of prompts, sampled over time, with the source list captured every run. Less precise than rankings, and more honest than most AI visibility dashboards.
How to measure AI search visibility →
Three objections I hear
“Nobody buys from ChatGPT.” Not directly. But buyers build shortlists there, and a shortlist you are not on is a deal you never hear about. A law firm I work with now receives inquiries that open with the client saying an assistant recommended them by name. Read that case study → A publication I built from zero has 90 of its 120 pages cited in AI answers seven months after launch. The numbers, page by page →
“This is SEO with a new invoice.” Partly, and anyone who denies it is selling. The technical and citation work overlaps heavily with what I already do. What genuinely differs is that there is no position two, and that your reputation is assembled from other people’s sites rather than ranked from your own.
“It cannot be measured, so it cannot be managed.” It can be measured, just not the way rankings are. Sampled prompts on a schedule give you a trend and a source list. That is enough to act on, and it is more than most brands have today.
What AI search optimization services include, and what they do not
Included. Prompt panel design and a baseline snapshot, entity and structured data work, content restructuring for citation, source analysis, and a monthly readout in plain language.
Not included. Buying placement inside AI answers, because that is not something you can buy. Nor a guarantee about what a model will say next month. Anyone offering either is describing something that does not exist.
Why an AI SEO consultant, not a tool
Most of what moves AI visibility is structural: schema, entity consistency, page architecture, the way a single claim is written. An AI SEO consultant who can only recommend those changes leaves you to find someone who can make them. I make them. For AI startups specifically, the first thing I check is what AI startups rank for. Before any of it, I read robots.txt to see which AI crawlers to allow. Link building is rarely in the first month, and AI citations with no link building explains why. The markup that carries the entity is in schema AI engines use. And since August, what Search Console now shows about AI answers is the first export I pull.
International SEO consulting →
What nobody can promise here
The engines change and citation behaviour changes with them. Anyone showing you a stable methodology is showing you a snapshot. So I commit to two things instead: measurement you can run yourself and check against mine, and structural work that was worth doing whether or not the engines had changed at all.
What is the difference between GEO and SEO?
SEO gets your page into a list of links. GEO, generative engine optimization, is about being named inside the answer itself. The underlying work overlaps: clear structure, real expertise, sources worth citing. What changes is that there is no position two to fall back on.
What does GEO mean?
GEO stands for generative engine optimization. It describes work aimed at getting a brand named inside answers written by AI systems, rather than ranked in a list of links beneath them. You will also see the same work called AEO or AI SEO.
What is AI visibility?
AI visibility is how often, and how accurately, a brand appears in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews. It has nothing to do with ranking positions. A brand can be invisible in AI answers while ranking well in Google, and that happens in both directions.
How do you measure AI search visibility?
By running the prompts your buyers use, across the engines that matter to you, on a fixed schedule. You track how often you appear, what gets said about you, and which sources the answer pulls from. The last one matters most, because those sources are the part you can influence.
What is the difference between AEO and SEO?
AEO is answer engine optimisation, the older name for most of what people now call GEO. The distinction that matters is not between the acronyms. SEO competes for a position in a list of results. AEO and GEO compete for a mention inside an answer that was written for the person asking. Underneath it is the same crawlable site, the same claims you can attribute to a named person, and the same mentions on other sites. What changes is what is being won, and how you measure whether you won it.
First step is a snapshot.
Your brand across the major AI engines, as it stands. Write to me and I’ll tell you what that takes.