AI Search Visibility
Be The Answer.
Not Just A
Result.
Generative engine optimization. Your buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews the questions they used to type into Google — and the brands named in those answers aren't always the ones ranking first.
Engines Measured
What Changed
For twenty years the job was to rank. A person typed a query, got ten links, and clicked one. Optimising meant being higher in that list.
Increasingly the person gets a written answer that names two or three brands and cites a handful of sources. There is no second page. There's frequently no click at all. You're either in the answer or you don't exist for that query.
The mechanics differ from SEO in one way that matters more than any other. When someone asks “who are the best providers of X,” the model assembles its answer largely from third-party sources — listicles, comparison pages, review sites, forum threads. Your own website is frequently not among them.
Which breaks the SEO instinct. Publishing a better page on your own domain does nothing if the sources being cited don't mention you. That reframes the work from publishing to placement, and it's the single most common thing teams get wrong when they start.
What An Audit Measures
A Real Prompt Set
25–30 prompts across five intent tiers — discovery, comparison, problem-first, buying criteria, branded — weighted toward the unbranded questions where visibility is won and most brands score near zero.
Every Major Engine
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, run in clean logged-out sessions. Personalisation will cheerfully show you your own brand and call it visibility.
Citation Analysis
The column that matters most. Not whether you're mentioned but what the answer cites — because that's where the fix lives, and it's often a competitor's content ranking your own category.
Entity Definition
Schema, sameAs consistency and third-party profiles, so models state who you are correctly. Factual drift — wrong founding year, wrong location, wrong services — is common and cheap to fix.
Competitive Share Of Voice
Who gets named when you don't, and which sources keep producing them. This is where the placement target list comes from.
The Branded Gap
High branded visibility is not good news on its own; it means the model can read your website. The distance between branded and unbranded is the finding.
The Five Root Causes
You're Not In The Cited Sources
The most common cause by a distance, and the one most resistant to on-site work. If the listicles the engines cite don't include you, no amount of publishing changes the answer.
The Entity Is Undefined
Inconsistent schema, thin third-party profiles, no clear machine-readable statement of who you are. Produces confident, wrong descriptions.
The Content Isn't Extractable
Answers buried in narrative. Models reach for content that states things plainly — definitions, comparisons, direct answers near the top.
Factual Drift
The model has outdated or wrong information and repeats it confidently. Fixable, and usually nobody has noticed it's happening.
The Category Is Framed Around Someone Else
A competitor defined the buying criteria and the models absorbed that framing. The hardest to shift and the most valuable when you do.
Fit
Good fit
- checkA considered purchase your buyers research conversationally — software, professional services, B2B.
- checkYou rank well and suspect it's converting less than it used to.
- checkA competitor keeps getting named in AI answers and nobody knows why.
- checkYou need a defensible baseline before committing budget to this.
Poor fit
- closeExpecting a guaranteed citation. Outputs vary by session and phrasing.
- closeHoping to skip fundamentals — GEO doesn't rescue a thin site with no authority.
- closeWanting one number to report upward. Honest measurement here is directional.
- closePurely local, transactional intent where buyers search and call.
Engagement Shapes
Visibility Baseline
Fixed scope · one-time
The prompt set run clean across five engines, with presence, position, description accuracy, competitors named and every source cited. Delivered as a written diagnosis.
Baseline & Placement Roadmap
Fixed scope · one-time
The audit plus a ranked target list of the sources actually being cited in your category, and what appearing in them would take.
Quarterly Tracking
Quarterly · retained
Same prompts, same conditions, every quarter. Direction over time is the signal; a single run is noise.
Team Coaching
Monthly · retained
Your team runs it. The full methodology is published openly — see also GEO coaching.
Pricing is set per engagement after a scoping call — scope and cadence move it too much for a single published number to be honest. You will have a fixed figure before any work starts.
Common Questions
What is generative engine optimization?
The practice of getting a brand named and cited inside AI-generated answers — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews — rather than only ranking in a list of links. The content fundamentals overlap with SEO; the measurement and the failure modes do not.
Is GEO different from AEO?
Mostly the same work under different labels. Answer engine optimization tends to emphasise direct-answer formats and featured snippets; generative engine optimization emphasises being cited inside a synthesised answer. In practice the same audit covers both.
Can you guarantee we'll be cited?
No, and treat anyone who does with suspicion. Outputs vary by session, phrasing and whether browsing is on. What's measurable is directional visibility across many prompts over time.
We rank first on Google. Isn't that enough?
Often not. One brand I audited appeared in five of nine results for its own name and zero times across thirty-two results on unbranded category questions. The site was healthy. It simply wasn't in the sources the models cite.
How long does this take to move?
Entity and schema fixes can register within weeks. Placement in the third-party sources engines cite is a quarter-scale effort, because it depends on other people publishing.
Find out what
the machines say.
A baseline audit across five engines tells you where you stand — and, more usefully, why.
BOOK A VISIBILITY AUDIT