AI SEO / GEO
AI SEO Services That Get Your Brand Cited
AI SEO — also called generative engine optimisation, or GEO — is the practice of structuring your content, entities and authority so AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini cite your brand in the answers they generate. Instead of competing only for a position in a list of links, you compete to be part of the answer itself.
AI SEO is the newest discipline inside our SEO services, and currently the one with the widest gap between opportunity and competition. Most businesses have no idea whether AI engines mention them, recommend a competitor, or describe them inaccurately — because almost nobody is measuring it yet.
The shift is straightforward to understand. A buyer who used to search "best CRM for small teams" and scan ten links now asks ChatGPT the same question and gets three recommendations with reasoning. If you are not one of the three, you were never in the running — and no ranking report will tell you, because your position did not change. You simply stopped being seen.
How AI engines decide who to cite.
Three stages. A brand has to survive all three to appear in an answer.
Retrieval
Before it writes anything, the engine gathers candidate sources — often via live search. If your page cannot be crawled, is slow, or does not rank for the underlying query, it is never considered. This is why AI SEO fails without solid technical foundations underneath it.
Extraction
The model then pulls specific, quotable passages. Content that front-loads a direct answer, uses headings phrased the way people actually ask, and states concrete facts is far easier to extract than the same information buried in a discursive intro.
Trust
Finally it decides which sources to name. Corroboration across independent sites, clear authorship, consistent entity information and genuine authority all raise the odds. AI systems are conservative about who they attribute claims to.
What our AI SEO service includes.
Get a free proposal →AI visibility audit
We test how ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini currently answer the questions your buyers ask — whether you appear, which competitors do, and whether what the models say about you is even accurate.
Answer-first content restructuring
Rewriting key pages so the direct answer appears in the opening lines rather than after three paragraphs of preamble, with headings phrased as the questions people genuinely type.
Entity & schema optimisation
Making it unambiguous who you are, what you do and where you operate — consistent entity data, structured markup and clean organisational signals that machines can parse without guessing.
Source authority building
AI engines cite what other credible sources corroborate. We build the mentions, citations and digital PR footprint that make your brand a safe attribution rather than an unknown one.
Technical foundations
Crawlability, speed, rendering and indexation — because retrieval happens before generation. Handled together with our technical SEO work.
Citation tracking & reporting
Ongoing monitoring of where and how you are mentioned across the major AI engines, reported alongside your traditional rankings so you can see both surfaces in one place.
Who needs AI SEO first
Every business will eventually. These categories are feeling it now, because their buyers research heavily before committing and have moved that research into AI tools:
How we work
From invisible to cited.
Measure first — you cannot improve AI visibility you have never quantified.
Benchmark
We build a query set from the questions your buyers actually ask, run them across the major AI engines, and record who gets cited and what is said about you. That becomes the baseline everything is measured against.
Fix accuracy & foundations
Correct any wrong or outdated information the models repeat about you, clean up entity signals, and resolve the technical issues stopping your pages being retrieved in the first place.
Restructure & publish
Rework priority pages into an answer-first structure and publish content that targets the specific questions where a competitor currently owns the answer.
Build corroboration
Earn the third-party mentions and citations that push you from a possible source to a trusted one, then re-run the benchmark to show what moved.
Is AI SEO actually different from SEO?
Partly, and it is worth being honest about which parts. Google's own guidance is that optimising for its AI features is still fundamentally SEO — the same crawlability, quality and authority signals apply, and a site that cannot rank will not get cited either. Any agency selling GEO as a wholly separate discipline that replaces SEO is overselling it.
What genuinely differs is the optimisation target. Traditional SEO competes for a position; AI SEO competes for inclusion in a synthesised answer, which rewards different content structure. Front-loaded answers, question-shaped headings, concrete verifiable facts and explicit source citations all measurably improve the odds of being quoted. Academic research from Princeton, Georgia Tech and IIT Delhi found that applying these techniques lifted content visibility in generative engines substantially, with adding statistics, citing sources and including quotations producing the largest gains.
So the accurate framing is that AI SEO is an additional layer on top of strong SEO, not a replacement for it. That is exactly how we run it — and if your technical foundations are weak, we will fix those first rather than sell you an AI package that cannot work.
Why now
The window is open, and it will not stay open.
Every emerging channel has a period where the effort required to win is far below what it will cost later. Search in 2004, Facebook ads in 2013, and AI answers right now. Most of your competitors are not measuring their AI visibility, let alone optimising for it.
See all SEO services →- Most competitors have no AI visibility baseline at all
- Citation patterns are still forming and can be influenced
- The techniques compound with your existing SEO investment
- Being early establishes you as the default cited source
What being cited actually changes
There is a meaningful difference between appearing in a list of results and being named in an answer. A link is one of ten options a person evaluates. A citation inside an AI answer arrives pre-endorsed — the model has already done the comparing and put you forward as the recommendation. That framing carries a weight ordinary search results do not.
It also reaches people earlier. Much of the research that used to happen across a dozen tabs now happens in a single conversation, and by the time someone reaches your website they may already have formed a view about whether you are credible. If that conversation never mentioned you, the visit never happens at all.
The uncomfortable part is that this is invisible in your analytics. Traffic from AI referrals is often small and poorly attributed, so a brand can be quietly losing the consideration stage while every dashboard still looks healthy. Measuring AI visibility is the only way to see it — which is why every engagement here starts with a benchmark rather than a pitch.
None of this means abandoning traditional SEO. It means recognising that the same investment now has to pay off across two surfaces instead of one, and structuring the work so it does.
Related services
SEO Services
The foundation AI visibility is built on. Start here if your technical health is unknown.
Explore →Technical SEO
Retrieval happens before generation — if you cannot be crawled, you cannot be cited.
Explore →Content Marketing
Answer-first content is what gets extracted and quoted by AI engines.
Explore →Questions, answered.
Still unsure? Ask us directly →
What is AI SEO?
AI SEO, or generative engine optimisation (GEO), is the practice of making your brand visible and cited inside AI-generated answers — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and similar. It uses many of the same signals as traditional SEO but optimises content structure for extraction and quotation rather than purely for ranking position.
Is GEO different from SEO, or just a rebrand?
It is an additional layer, not a replacement — and anyone claiming otherwise is overselling. Google states that optimising for its generative features is still SEO, and a page that cannot rank generally will not be cited either. What genuinely differs is content structure: front-loaded answers, question-shaped headings and concrete verifiable facts measurably improve citation odds. We treat it as SEO plus, not SEO instead.
How do I know if AI engines mention my brand?
You have to test it directly, which is where every engagement starts. We build a set of the questions your buyers actually ask, run them across the major engines, and record whether you appear, which competitors do, and whether what is said about you is accurate. Most businesses are surprised by the results in both directions.
Can AI say wrong things about my business?
Yes, and it is more common than people expect — outdated pricing, services you no longer offer, wrong locations, or confusion with a similarly named company. Because models draw on whatever information exists publicly, correcting the underlying sources and strengthening your entity signals is often the single highest-value fix we make.
How long does AI SEO take to show results?
Faster than traditional SEO in some respects, because accuracy fixes and content restructuring can change what engines say within weeks. Building the corroboration and authority that make you a consistently cited source takes months, much like link building. We re-benchmark regularly so progress is visible rather than assumed.
Does AI SEO replace my need to rank on Google?
No. Traditional rankings still drive the majority of clicks for most businesses, and they also feed AI retrieval — engines frequently pull from pages that already rank. The right approach is to protect your rankings while adding the structural work that wins citations. Our SEO services cover both together.
Which AI engines do you optimise for?
ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, and Gemini — the four that currently drive meaningful discovery. The underlying techniques transfer well between them because they share the same fundamentals: retrievable content, extractable structure and corroborated authority.
Is this worth doing for a small business?
Often more so than for a large one. Big brands already have the mention volume that makes models comfortable citing them. A smaller business with genuinely useful, well-structured content on a specific topic can become the cited source for that niche far more easily than it could outrank the same competitors in classic search.
Find out what AI says about you.
We will run your real buyer questions across the major AI engines and show you exactly where you appear, where a competitor does instead, and what it would take to change that.