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AI SEO agency for brands that need to be cited, not just ranked

AI SEO — also called generative engine optimization (GEO) or answer engine optimization (AEO) — is the practice of making a brand the source that AI assistants cite when answering questions in its category. It matters because a growing share of buyers now get an answer without ever visiting a website, and if you are not named in that answer you are not in the consideration set at all.

Something worth saying plainly before you buy this from anyone. Google's own guidance, published in May 2026, states that optimizing for its generative AI search is "still SEO" — and that you do not need llms.txt files, AI-specific markup or content chunking for it. That is true, for Google. It is not true for ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude, which use different retrieval sources, cite different pages, and cannot be measured in Search Console at all. That gap is what this service is actually for.

  • Citation share, tracked monthly
  • All major assistants, not just Google
  • Entity and knowledge-graph work
  • Honest about what Google says
Let's TalkSee our work

AI SEO at a glance

Key facts about AI SEO from ASqware
Also known asGEO (generative engine optimization), AEO (answer engine optimization), LLM SEO
Engines coveredChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode
What is genuinely different from SEORetrieval-bot access, entity consistency, third-party citation sources, and measurement
What is not differentFor Google specifically, almost nothing — Google states this is still SEO
How it is measuredCitation share across a tracked question set, not rankings — Search Console does not report AI answers
Typical time to movementSix to twelve weeks for retrieval and entity fixes; longer where third-party citations must be earned
PrerequisiteConventional SEO fundamentals. AI systems mostly cite pages that already rank.

Is this you?

Signs you need AI SEO

  • Asking ChatGPT about your category returns competitors and not you
  • Organic traffic is falling while your rankings have not moved
  • You appear in Google's blue links but never inside the AI Overview
  • Your brand, product names or spellings are inconsistent across the web
  • You have no idea whether AI assistants describe your business accurately
  • Your robots.txt blocks AI crawlers and nobody made that decision deliberately

What you get

What our AI SEO work covers

  • Retrieval access audit

    Whether the crawlers that fetch pages at question time — OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-User — can actually reach your content. Blocking these removes you from citations entirely, and a surprising number of sites block them by accident through a blanket rule or a firewall setting nobody reviewed.

  • Citation tracking and share of voice

    A tracked set of the questions your buyers actually ask, run across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and AI Overviews on a schedule, recording who gets cited and how you are described. Search Console reports none of this, so without deliberate measurement you are working blind.

  • Entity consistency

    One name, one spelling, one description of what you do, everywhere you appear — your site, schema markup, LinkedIn, directories, Wikipedia where it applies. Language models resolve entities across sources, and inconsistency makes you harder to identify and easier to omit.

  • Earning citations on the sources AI trusts

    Assistants disproportionately cite a narrow set of sources — established publications, review platforms, community discussions, documentation. Being present and accurate on those matters more than another page on your own site.

  • Answer-shaped content

    Pages that state the answer directly in the opening lines, use unambiguous naming, and hold up when a passage is lifted out of context. This overlaps heavily with good SEO, and we will not pretend otherwise.

  • Correcting what assistants get wrong

    When an assistant describes your pricing, features or availability incorrectly, that error came from a source. We find it, and fix or outweigh it.

Deliverables

What lands in your inbox every month

  • Retrieval and crawler access audit with a fix list
  • A tracked question set with baseline citation share
  • Monthly citation report across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and AI Overviews
  • Entity and structured data consistency work
  • Third-party citation and mention programme
  • Answer-shaped content and existing page restructuring
  • Monthly review with the strategist doing the work

How we run it

The order we work in

  1. Baseline

    Build the question set your buyers actually ask, run it across every major assistant, and record who gets cited today. Without a baseline there is no way to tell later whether anything worked.

  2. Open the doors

    Fix retrieval-bot access, rendering and indexation. This is unglamorous and occasionally the entire problem — a site that blocks OAI-SearchBot cannot be cited by ChatGPT no matter how good its content is.

  3. Fix the entity

    Make your name, category and claims consistent across your own site, your schema and every third-party profile. Ambiguity is the most common reason a brand is skipped in an answer.

  4. Earn the citations

    Get accurate, current information about you onto the sources these systems actually pull from, and publish material worth quoting on your own site.

  5. Measure and correct

    Re-run the question set monthly. Track citation share, fix inaccuracies at source, and expand into the questions you are still absent from.

Proof

Where this work has paid off

Abstract diagram of search visibility rising across a B2B travel technology category

Travel technology / B2B SaaS · Kochi and Dubai, selling globally

Building category visibility for an AI travel booking platform

Eight target terms reached the first page of Google within six months, from a domain with no organic history and in a category dominated by incumbents. Those positions are worth roughly 1,100 organic clicks a month. ChatGPT now cites the site as a source for four of the category questions we track — visibility that did not exist when the programme started, and that no ranking report would have captured.

Read the case study

Questions

AI SEO questions we are asked most

What is AI SEO?

AI SEO is the practice of getting a brand cited inside AI-generated answers — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews. It is also called generative engine optimization (GEO) or answer engine optimization (AEO); the three terms are used interchangeably and there is no settled distinction between them. The goal shifts from ranking a page to being the source an assistant names.

What is the difference between GEO, AEO and AI SEO?

In practice, nothing meaningful — they are competing names for the same work and are used interchangeably across the industry. GEO (generative engine optimization) emphasises being cited inside generated answers, AEO (answer engine optimization) emphasises direct answers and featured snippets, and AI SEO is the plainest label. Anyone selling them as three separate services is selling you the same thing three times.

Is AI SEO just SEO with a new name?

For Google, largely yes — Google's own May 2026 guidance says optimizing for its generative AI search is "still SEO" and that no special files, markup or content chunking are needed. For everything that is not Google, no. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude retrieve from different sources, cite different pages, and report nothing to Search Console. The distinct work is retrieval access, entity consistency, third-party citations and measurement.

Do we need an llms.txt file?

No. Google has stated explicitly that it does not use llms.txt, and no major assistant currently requires it. It costs nothing to publish and it is not harmful, but any agency presenting it as a core deliverable is selling activity rather than outcomes. Your robots.txt rules for retrieval crawlers matter enormously; llms.txt does not.

How do you measure AI SEO?

By citation share across a fixed set of questions, tracked over time. You define the questions your buyers ask, run them across each assistant on a schedule, and record how often you are named, how you are described, and who is named instead. Search Console and GA4 report almost nothing about AI answers, so this measurement has to be built deliberately rather than pulled from an existing tool.

Will AI search kill our organic traffic?

It reduces clicks for informational queries, where the assistant answers without a visit, and affects commercial queries far less because people still want to compare and buy. The practical response is to stop measuring purely on sessions, make sure you are the cited source when the answer is generated, and concentrate your content on the questions that lead to a purchase rather than the ones that end in a definition.

Can you guarantee we will be cited by ChatGPT?

No, and nobody can. Assistants generate answers probabilistically, the same question can return different sources on different days, and the systems change without notice. What can be done is to remove every technical reason you are excluded, make your entity unambiguous, and get accurate information onto the sources these systems draw from — then measure whether citation share moves.

Do we need conventional SEO as well?

Yes, and it comes first. AI systems overwhelmingly cite pages that already rank well, because retrieval leans on the same signals of quality and authority. AI SEO is a layer on top of solid search fundamentals, not a replacement for them or a shortcut past them. If your technical SEO is broken, fix that before buying this.

Works well with

Services that make this one work harder

Next step

Talk to us about AI SEO

A thirty-minute call. We will tell you what we would do first, roughly what it would cost, and whether it is the right place to start.

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