AI search optimization: get named when customers ask ChatGPT

What is AI SEO?

AI SEO is the work of making your business visible to AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Google's AI Overviews) so they name you, get your facts right, and link your site. It packages what the industry calls AEO and GEO into one discipline built on strong, structured SEO.

Here is the part most agencies selling "AI optimization" won't tell you: Google's own AI features documentation states there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode" and no special schema.org structured data for them. The foundation is ordinary, excellent SEO: clear pages, correct facts, real authority. What changes with AI engines is how ruthlessly they compress results: they extract a handful of names from the sources they trust. Our job is making sure the facts about your business are consistent, machine-readable, and citable everywhere those engines look, which is the same job that wins local rankings.

What's the difference between SEO, AEO, and GEO?

SEO earns rankings in classic search results. AEO (answer engine optimization) targets direct answers: featured snippets, voice, and AI answer boxes. GEO (generative engine optimization) targets AI-written responses in tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. In practice they share one foundation: crawlable pages, structured facts, and content worth citing.

We fold all three into one service because splitting them fragments the work without changing it. The table below shows where each term points and what actually moves the needle.

Does AI search actually change how customers find businesses?

Yes, measurably. Pew Research Center found Google users click a traditional result on only 8% of visits when an AI summary appears, versus 15% without one, and 26% of searches with a summary end the session entirely, versus 16% without.

The same Pew study (68,879 real searches from 900 U.S. adults) found users click a link inside the AI summary itself on just 1% of visits. Read those three numbers together and the conclusion is uncomfortable but clear: when AI answers appear, most of the traffic never leaves the results page. The winners are the businesses the answer names, not the sites ranked underneath it. That is a different game from classic SEO's "rank higher, get more clicks", and it is why being the named recommendation now matters as much as the ranking itself.

How do AI assistants choose which businesses to name?

They assemble answers from sources they trust (your website, your profiles, directories, reviews, and coverage), then name the businesses whose facts are consistent and well-evidenced across those sources. Being cited as a link and being named in the answer are different outcomes, and the gap between them is large.

Semrush's Ghost Citations study measured that gap across 3,981 domain appearances: 62% of AI citations are "ghosts": the engine links a site as a source but never names the brand in its answer. Gemini names brands in its answer text 83.7% of the time but links them as sources only 21.4% of the time. So the work is double-sided: your site must be worth citing, and your brand facts must be so unambiguous that the engine can confidently attach your name to the answer. That second half is entity work: identical name, address, phone, and services everywhere, backed by schema and an llms.txt file.

Can anyone guarantee rankings in ChatGPT?

No, and you should walk away from anyone who promises it. Sistrix measured a single ChatGPT model update shifting 47% of its citation distribution within 48 hours. AI answers are too volatile for guarantees. What can be done honestly: measure your visibility, fix the inputs, and track the trend.

That is exactly how we run this service. We test the real questions your customers ask, record which businesses each engine names, fix what is blocking you (crawler access, missing schema, inconsistent facts, thin proof), and re-test on a schedule. You see the movement in your monthly report next to your Google and Bing data. When a model update reshuffles the deck, you see that too, with our read on what changed. It starts with the free audit, which checks whether AI crawlers can even read your site today.

What's included in AI search optimization

The deliverables, in the order we usually run them:

• AI visibility baseline: what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot say today when asked for a business like yours
• Crawler access fixes so GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot can read your pages
• Entity cleanup: identical business facts across your site, profiles, and key directories
• Schema markup and llms.txt written for your business
• Citable content: pages with direct answers, real numbers, and named sources
• Re-testing and trend reporting alongside your monthly SEO reporting