AI search visibility
An explanation of what changed in search, what the work involves, and why nobody can sell you a citation.
from $850 /mo
per month alongside SEO · from $1,450 /mo standalone · excludes ad spend
01 — Context
What changed
For twenty-five years, a search engine's job was to hand you a list and let you choose. Now, more often, it answers.
Google puts an AI-written summary above the results for a growing share of queries. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Gemini answer directly and cite a handful of sources, usually between three and eight. People increasingly ask an assistant for a shortlist rather than searching for one, and they act on the answer without clicking anything.
Two terms have attached themselves to the response. GEO, generative engine optimisation, is work aimed at being used and cited by systems that generate answers. AEO, answer engine optimisation, is the same idea framed around being the answer rather than a result. The distinction between them is mostly marketing; the underlying work is the same, and this page uses both because you'll see both.
Worth stating plainly: this discipline is roughly two years old. There is no decade of established practice, the systems change their behaviour without notice, and anyone presenting this as a settled science is selling you certainty they don't have. What exists is a set of defensible practices, several of which are just good information architecture applied to a new consumer.
02
Compare
02 — Compare
Why this isn't just SEO
Classic search
- Someone types a query
- The engine ranks pages
- Ten links appear
- The person chooses one and visits
- You get a visit and a chance to convert
AI retrieval
- Someone asks a question
- The system retrieves passages from many sources
- Diverges here It composes one answer
- It cites a few of them
- The person may act without visiting anything
What wins in classic search: relevance and authority for the query. What you're competing for: position. What wins in AI retrieval: being clearly identifiable as an entity, having a passage that answers the question cleanly enough to lift, and being a source the system treats as reliable. What you're competing for: inclusion in the answer, and being named in it.
The practical difference. Ranking fifth on Google still earns clicks. Being the fifth-best passage for a question earns nothing, because the answer only quotes a few. Rank is a gradient. Citation is closer to a threshold.
The overlap is large, which is why this runs alongside SEO rather than instead of it, and why the add-on price is lower than the standalone one.
03
Scope
03 — Scope
What we actually do
- Entity and brand clarity
- Making it unambiguous who you are, what you do and what you're called, consistently, in the places these systems read: your own site, structured data, and the third-party sources that describe you. A system that can't resolve you into a single entity won't confidently name you. Done looks like: your name, category and offering are stated identically everywhere they appear.
- Content structured for extraction
- Answering questions in passages that can be lifted whole: the answer first, the qualification after, in language that doesn't require the surrounding paragraph to make sense. Clear headings, one idea per section, definitions where a definition is being asked for. This is also just good writing, which is convenient.
- Source-quality signals
- Dates, authorship, specifics, references, and content that isn't a rewrite of the four pages above it. Retrieval systems weight sources that look like sources. There is no trick here, and the absence of a trick is the point.
- Covering the questions that actually get asked
- Finding out what people ask assistants in your category — the comparative ones, the "is X worth it", the "who should I use for", the objections — and making sure there is a page that answers each properly. Most sites answer none of them, because those questions never appeared in a keyword tool.
- Monitoring
- Checking, on a schedule, whether the assistants mention you for the questions that matter, what they say, and which source they used instead of you when they didn't. Sampled, manual and repeatable, and reported honestly as a sample rather than dressed up as a measurement.
04
Honesty
04 — Honesty
What can and cannot be measured
Observable
- Whether a given assistant names you for a given prompt, checked by asking it. This is a sample, not a metric — the same prompt can return different answers to different people on different days.
- Referral traffic from assistants that pass a referrer, visible in your analytics as its own source.
- Impressions and clicks in Search Console for queries where an AI summary appears, though Google does not separate them out cleanly.
- Whether your pages contain the structured, extractable answers the work is meant to produce. That one is fully verifiable, because it is our own output.
Inferable, with care
- Changes in the ratio of impressions to clicks, which may indicate answers being read without visits.
- Branded search volume moving after a period of assistant visibility.
Not measurable by anyone, us included
- How many people saw your name inside an AI answer. No platform publishes it.
- How often you were cited across all assistants. There is no equivalent of a rank tracker that is comprehensive rather than sampled.
- Whether being cited caused a sale, unless the person tells you.
So: we cannot guarantee that ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's summaries will cite you. It cannot be bought, there is no submission form, and any agency claiming to guarantee it is either mistaken or lying. What we can commit to is the work: entities resolved, questions answered, passages structured to be quotable, and a monitoring sample reported honestly, including the months it doesn't move.
05
Excluded
05 — Excluded
What is not included
- Any guarantee, promise or projection of citation, mention or inclusion.
- Paid placement in AI answers. It doesn't exist as a product. If it ever does, it will be labelled advertising and it will be a different service.
- Full SEO. This is scoped to run alongside SEO, not to replace it. Standalone is available and priced, but a site with unresolved technical problems should fix those first.
- Content volume at SEO scale. The standalone tier covers a smaller number of answer-focused pages; the volume sits in the SEO tiers.
- Wikipedia editing, review-site manipulation, or anything that involves altering third-party platforms to change what they say about you.
- Reputation management.
06
Cost
06 — Cost
What this costs
Alongside an SEO retainer
from $850 /mo
per month · excludes ad spend
Standalone
from $1,450 /mo
per month · excludes ad spend
The add-on is cheaper because the technical and content foundations are already being paid for once. Starting prices; what moves them is category complexity, how many questions need covering, and how clearly your business is currently described across the web.
07 — Questions
Questions people ask before signing
Is SEO dead?
No, and the people saying so are usually selling the replacement. What has happened is narrower: queries with a simple factual answer now produce fewer clicks, because the answer is on the results page. Queries where someone wants to compare, verify, buy or contact still send visits, and those are the commercially valuable ones. The technical and structural work underneath both disciplines is largely the same work.
How is GEO or AEO different from SEO?
SEO competes for a position in a list. This competes for inclusion in a composed answer. Ranking fifth still earns clicks; being the fifth-most-quotable passage earns nothing, because only a few sources get named. The tactics overlap heavily — clean structure, clear entities, genuinely useful content — but the target is different, and so is what counts as success.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will cite me?
No. Nobody can. There is no submission process, no paid placement, and no mechanism to compel a citation. Any agency guaranteeing it is either mistaken about how these systems work or is counting on you not checking.
Should I do this instead of SEO, or as well?
As well, in almost every case, which is why the add-on price exists. Standalone makes sense if your site is already technically sound and well-structured and you specifically want the answer-coverage work. If the site has crawl or content problems, that comes first.
How would I know it's working?
By the sample. On a schedule we ask the assistants the questions that matter in your category and record whether you're named, what's said, and who was cited instead. That sample goes in the report, including the periods where nothing changed. It is honest evidence of movement, not a metric with a decimal point, and we won't dress it up as one.
08
Contact
08 — Contact
Tell us what you need
Send the site address and two or three questions your buyers ask before they choose someone. We'll ask the assistants those questions before replying, and tell you what came back.
support@vexorao.com · +1 654 2501 657
Related