AI SEO is the practice of optimizing your business so AI assistants — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — mention and recommend it in their answers. Traditional SEO gets you ranked on a results page; AI SEO gets you named in the answer itself. With tens of millions of AI searches happening daily and each answer citing only 3–5 sources, being one of those sources is the new first page of Google.
A growing share of buyers skip the search results page entirely. They ask "who's the best accountant near me?" or "what's a good CRM for a small agency?" and act on the AI's answer. Three things make this urgent:
LLMs don't crawl the web the way Google does. Their recommendations come from a blend of sources, each of which you can influence:
Run 20–30 real queries a customer would ask across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity ("best [service] in [city]", "who should I hire for X"). Record who gets named. This is your benchmark — and usually a wake-up call.
Make your business unambiguous: identical name, address, phone, and service descriptions on your site, Google Business Profile, and every major directory. Inconsistency makes models hedge — and hedging models leave you out.
LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, and Review schema turn your pages into machine-readable facts. Retrieval systems lean on structured data to verify who you are before citing you.
Allow GPTBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, and ClaudeBot in robots.txt, and add an llms.txt file that summarizes your business for language models. If AI can't read you, it can't cite you.
AI quotes content that already looks like an answer: question-based headings, a direct one-paragraph answer up top, then supporting detail — the same structure AEO uses for featured snippets. Build topic clusters so you're the obvious authority on your niche, not a one-page wonder.
Earn placements on the sources models trust: local directories, industry roundups, "best of" lists, press mentions, and review platforms. Reviews matter twice — they feed both Google's local pack and the sentiment AI models absorb about your brand.
Re-run your query set monthly. Track how often you're named vs. competitors, and in what sentiment. This is the AI-era equivalent of rank tracking — and it tells you exactly where the gaps are.
Retrieval-based systems (AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity) can start citing you in roughly 6 weeks once your foundation is right. Baked-in training-data presence builds over months as your citations and mentions accumulate. Either way, the compounding favors whoever starts first.
Everything above is doable in-house if you have the time. If you'd rather have it done for you, our AI Visibility service handles the audit, schema, llms.txt, citations, and monthly AI share-of-voice reporting — alongside local SEO and Google Business Profile optimization.