AI search optimization
More people now ask an AI assistant instead of typing a search. AI search optimization is the work of making sure that when they ask about what you do, the answer includes your business and gets the facts right.
Book a consultationWhat it is
Being part of the answer.
Assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude, along with the AI summaries that now appear at the top of Google results, answer questions by reading the web and summarizing what they find. Many of them link to the sources they used.
If your site is hard for these systems to read, vague about what you offer, or contradicted by what other sites say about you, you get left out of the answer or described wrongly. If it is clear, specific and backed up elsewhere, you have a real chance of being the business they name.
You may also see this called generative engine optimization (GEO) or answer engine optimization (AEO). It is the same work under different names, and it builds on SEO rather than replacing it.
What we do
Six things that decide whether you are mentioned.
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01 / Baseline
Find out where you stand
We put the questions your customers ask to the major assistants and record whether you appear, how you are described and which sources they cite.
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02 / Access
Let the right crawlers in
We check that AI crawlers can reach your pages and that nothing in your robots.txt, firewall or site code is turning them away by accident. Which ones to allow is your decision.
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03 / Content
Put the answer first
We restructure key pages around real questions, with direct answers and specifics such as services, areas, prices and timeframes stated plainly.
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04 / Structure
Add structured data
Organization, service and FAQ markup tells machines who you are and what you offer in a form they can read without guessing.
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05 / Consistency
Make the facts agree
Assistants cross-check. We align your name, services, locations and details across your site, business profiles, directories and social accounts.
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06 / Sources
Earn trusted mentions
AI answers lean on sources they trust. We help you earn a place in the directories, review sites and publications that keep getting cited in your field.
AI search and SEO
Mostly the same foundations, with a few real differences.
What carries over from SEO
- A fast site that crawlers can reach and read.
- Original, useful content written for people.
- Structured data and clean page structure.
- A good reputation on other reputable sites.
What is different
- There is no page one. You are in the answer or you are not.
- Questions are longer and more conversational than typed searches.
- What other sites say about you carries more weight.
- Measurement is newer and less exact than search rankings.
Straight talk
What we will not promise you.
A guaranteed mention.
AI companies decide how their systems choose and cite sources, and they change it often. Nobody outside them can guarantee you a place in an answer.
Certainty.
This is a young field. We tell you which recommendations are well established and which are still a best guess.
Tricks.
No hidden text, fake reviews or pages written to manipulate a model. Shortcuts like these put your reputation and your search rankings at risk.
Measurement
How we know it is working.
There is no single score for AI visibility yet, so we track several signals and report them together.
- Mentions and citationsA fixed set of customer questions, re-run on a schedule, to see whether and how you appear.
- AccuracyWhether assistants describe your services, locations and details correctly.
- Visits from AI assistantsReferral traffic from AI tools, tracked in your analytics.
- EnquiriesLeads who say an AI assistant pointed them to you.
FAQ
AI search questions.
Is AI search optimization the same as SEO?
They overlap heavily. A site that is fast, well structured and useful is the foundation for both. AI search optimization adds attention to how assistants read and summarize your content, how consistently your business is described across the web, and whether you are mentioned in the sources assistants rely on.
Does this replace SEO?
No. People still use ordinary search, and the AI summaries inside search results draw on the same pages. We recommend running the two as one program, which is how we plan them.
Can you make ChatGPT recommend my business?
Nobody can guarantee that. What we can do is improve the odds, by making your business easy for an assistant to find, understand and verify.
Should we block AI crawlers?
It depends on your goals. Blocking them keeps your content out of AI systems, and allowing them makes it possible to be cited. Some crawlers collect training data and others fetch pages for live answers, and they can be treated differently. We walk you through the options and set up whichever you choose.
Do we need an llms.txt file?
It is a proposed convention for giving AI tools a summary of your site. It costs little to add, but there is no solid evidence yet that the major assistants rely on it. We treat it as optional and put the effort into work with a clearer payoff.
How long does it take to see a difference?
Assistants that search the live web can pick up changes to your site within weeks. Building mentions on other sites takes longer, and assistants that answer from older training data are the slowest to change.
Next step
Let’s look at your site together.
Book a consultation. We’ll go through where your website and search visibility stand today, what’s holding them back, and what we’d do first.
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