AI SEARCH VISIBILITY
Where you stand in AI answers
Buyers are asking AI about your category right now.
Find out whether you are in the answer, why not, and what to publish about it. Then find out whether the fix worked, checked against evidence.
What AI Search Visibility is
AI Search Visibility tracks whether AI assistants name you when buyers ask about your category, and whether you appear in Google AI Overviews for a given market. When you are not named, it tells you why. It is usually one of four things: your entity information is thin, your pages are not written so a model can quote them, your story does not match how buyers describe the category, or you are absent from the directories assistants read. It then produces the briefs, drafts, structured data and outreach that close the gap, and re-checks afterwards to confirm it worked. AEO and GEO are the names people give this work. Content engineering is how it is done.
The problem
The answer happens before anyone reaches your website.
A buyer used to search, see ten links, and choose one. Now they ask, and get a paragraph naming three brands. If you are not one of the three, you were never in the running, and nothing in your analytics will tell you it happened. There is no impression, no click and no bounce. The channel is invisible by construction, which is why most brands have no idea whether they are winning or losing in it.
What AI search visibility covers
Three ways a buyer finds you.
SEO is work you already do. The other two are new, they run on what SEO built, and AEO and GEO are the names people have put on them.
Fail the first and the other two never happen.
A buyer asks one thing. Before your name comes out of the other end, three separate things have to go right, and they go in sequence. If nothing about you is readable and ranked, there is no passage to quote. If there is no quotable passage, there is nothing for a recommendation to attach itself to. That is why a score on its own is not much use: it tells you that you are missing, and the whole question is where.
SEO
Search engine optimization
The demand underneath
The buyer asks
“applicant tracking software for small teams”
What comes back
Ten links, and you are one of them. This is the demand your team already works, and it is what an engine reads before it answers anything.
Missing here looks like
You are absent from the ten links too.
You win by
Rankings, the pages behind them, and the links pointing at them.
What gets counted
Positions, SERP features, and the clicks and impressions behind them.
What we do
Keyword demand and assistant prompts merged into one map of what your buyers ask anywhere. The two overlap about a third of the time, so a company can win every tracked prompt and still be missing from the long-tail commercial queries that close.
AEO
Answer engine optimization
The direct answer
The buyer asks
“How do I stop support tickets piling up overnight?”
What comes back
One direct answer to that exact question, built from somebody’s page. It is yours, or it is a competitor’s.
Missing here looks like
You rank, and somebody else is the answer.
You win by
Answers that stand on their own, away from the page they sit on.
What gets counted
Which answers name you, on which questions, across the assistants you track.
What we do
Every tracked question run across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and the other assistants your buyers use, repeatedly, so you have a rate you can trust.
GEO
Generative engine optimization
The recommendation
The buyer asks
“What are the best alternatives to the market leader?”
What comes back
Two or three vendor names, with reasons attached. You are named, or you are invisible.
Missing here looks like
You get quoted as a fact and left out of the shortlist.
You win by
What other people say about you: review sites, community threads, comparison articles.
What gets counted
Links and earned mentions, which decide both ranking and whether a model trusts you enough to cite you.
What we do
The sources behind each answer, ranked by how often they are cited for your questions, so the work goes where the engine is actually reading.
Citability audit
Runs under all three
Whether your own pages can be ranked, quoted or cited at all. Schema, FAQ structure, comparison tables, answer formatting, page by page. Then the site as a graph: four pages competing for one intent, a commercial page orphaned three clicks deep, a cluster structure spreading authority too thin to hold.
SEO gets you listed. AEO makes you the answer.
GEO gets you recommended.
The labels matter less than knowing which step broke, because the fix is a different piece of work at each one. All three are counted against the same questions, which is what stops a page that earns citations while quietly losing organic traffic from looking like a win.
Why one run is not a reading
That is one run. Ask the same question tomorrow and the answer can come back different, with a different brand named first, because nothing about these models is fixed. So the reading that counts is the pattern across many runs.
What you get
Four things it does, in order
Whether you are named
Your category questions asked on a schedule across the major assistants and tracked over time, so you have a trend you can act on.
On a schedule
Why you were not
Which sources the answer drew on, and what the brands named instead have published. Absence with a cause attached.
The cause, with evidence
What to publish about it
A specific brief for the gap, structured to be extracted and attributed, and written against your own brand specification.
In your voice
Whether the fix worked
AI Search Visibility re-checks the question afterwards, so the loop closes on evidence.
Checked against evidence
In practice
Are you in the answer, or is your competitor?
Every tracked question is kept with its full answer and the sources behind it, run after run, so a change is visible as a change. Where you are absent, the diagnosis explains which of four things is missing, and the fix is checked afterwards against evidence.
Where that answer came from
The same question again, opened up. These are the pages the assistant read before it wrote the answer above, and none of them is yours. That is why the fix usually sits somewhere other than your own website.
AI Search Visibility, as you would work in it
Coverage
What it checks, and where
| Surface | What we read |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Answers to your tracked questions, and the sources cited |
| Claude | Answers to the same question set, and what it cites |
| Perplexity | Answers and citations, which are unusually explicit here |
| Gemini | Answers to the same question set, for comparison |
| Google AI Overviews | Per market, because the country genuinely changes the result |
| Directory listings | Whether the places assistants draw entity facts from actually list you |
| Your own pages | Whether they are structured so a model can extract and attribute a passage |
The surfaces are not a fixed list: assistants are added as your buyers move to them. Your markets come from what Brand DNA and the Brand AI Assistant work out about where you sell, and you can change them or add more. There is no default country, deliberately.
Why this compounds
Each turn makes the next one cheaper.
Citations are slow to earn and slow to lose. That is the whole argument for starting.
Be present where they read
Reviews, forums, trade press, reference pages. Most of an answer comes from places you do not own.
The engines start citing you
Your name appears in answers to the questions your buyers actually ask.
Referred visitors arrive
They come recommended, which is why this traffic behaves so differently from a cold click.
More people describe you
Being named gets you written about, and that is what the next crawl finds.
And round again, from further ahead than last time
The forward half of that loop we can show you. The part where citations also lift your ordinary search ranking is the mechanism we expect. We have not measured it, and we will say so on a call.
Where it connects
What it draws on and feeds
- Brand DNA decides what the drafts say at every gate, so a fix still sounds like you. It is also what an answer is compared against when AI describes you differently.
- Competitor Signals holds the set of names you are measured against, so an absence has a shape and you can see who is winning the answers you are losing.
- Social Signals holds the places the third gate reads from, and what they say about you there.
- Citability audit checks whether your own pages can be ranked, quoted or cited at all, which is the question under all three gates.
- Generated content turns the gap into a brief and a draft, in your voice. You decide how to format it and where it goes live.
- Analytics shows what the traffic did once the fix landed, so the loop closes on a number.
Questions
AI Search Visibility, answered
The rest of Signal AI Visibility Optimization (AIVO)
Every module reads the same brand definition
Find out what AI is telling your buyers.
Tell us five questions someone might ask before buying in your category. We will run them before the call and show you the answers.
See your own questions asked