AI search
What AI SEO actually is
Generative engine optimisation, answer engine optimisation, AI SEO — three names for the same work: being found, understood, and quoted by the systems that now answer instead of listing.
9 min read
A person with a question used to get ten links and decide for themselves. Increasingly they get a paragraph, assembled on the spot from a handful of sources a model decided to trust. Nobody is choosing between your page and a competitor's any more. Something is choosing on their behalf, and then writing the summary.
The work of being one of those trusted sources has three names in circulation — generative engine optimisation (GEO), answer engine optimisation (AEO), and plain AI SEO. They describe the same thing. The naming is unsettled because the practice is about three years old.
It is not the same list as Google's
The first assumption worth discarding is that ranking well on Google carries over automatically. It used to. It doesn't now.
70% → <20%
Overlap between top Google links and the sources AI systems cite
4.3×
How much more often recently updated content appears in AI answers
~200
Words into a page where most extracted answers are found
The overlap between what Google ranks first and what an assistant quotes has collapsed. These systems are developing their own preferences about what is worth citing, and those preferences do not reward the same things a results page does.
How a question actually gets answered
Understanding the mechanism makes the tactics obvious rather than mystical. When someone asks an assistant a real question, it rarely runs that question as a single search.
- 01
The question is broken apart
One question becomes several narrower searches. Someone asking which villa to book on a Greek island generates separate retrievals for the location, the type of stay, the season, and the practicalities — a pattern usually called query fan-out.
- 02
Passages are retrieved, not pages
What comes back is not a ranked list of websites but fragments: the specific paragraphs that appear to answer each sub-question. Your page competes passage by passage, not as a whole.
- 03
An answer is composed
The model writes a single response from those fragments, attributing some of them. A page can inform the answer without being named, which is the least useful outcome available to you.
- 04
The reader may or may not click
Often the answer is enough and the visit never happens. Being cited is what determines whether you exist in that exchange at all.
Your page is no longer competing as a page. It is competing paragraph by paragraph, against paragraphs from everyone else.
What this changes about writing
If retrieval happens at passage level, then the unit of work is the passage. Several habits follow from that, and none of them are tricks.
- Answer the question in the first paragraph
- Extraction weights the opening heavily. A page that spends four paragraphs establishing context before saying anything has hidden its answer from the only reader that matters here.
- Make each passage able to stand alone
- A fragment that only makes sense after the two paragraphs above it cannot be quoted. Self-contained sections are quotable; narrative that depends on sequence is not.
- Use the question as the heading
- Headings phrased the way people actually ask give a retrieval system an obvious match. This is why a genuine FAQ outperforms a page of prose that contains the same facts.
- Be specific enough to be worth quoting
- Models paraphrase generic claims and quote specific ones. A number, a constraint, a named trade-off gives the system something it cannot generate on its own.
- Keep it current
- Freshness is one of the strongest observed signals. Content updated recently appears several times more often than content left alone, which makes a small maintained set better than a large abandoned one.
The part most people get wrong
AI search shows a systematic preference for what others say about you over what you say about yourself. Earned coverage, independent mentions, and third-party references carry more weight than your own marketing pages — for the same reason a person would trust them more.
That has an uncomfortable implication. A large part of AI visibility is not on-site work at all. It is being the kind of business that gets mentioned, reviewed, listed, and written about elsewhere. No amount of markup substitutes for that.
What to do first
In rough order of return, for a business starting from nothing:
- Find out what the assistants currently say about you. For most businesses the answer is nothing, or something wrong, and both are fixable.
- Fix the technical foundation. These systems largely read the same crawled web as search engines; if you are invisible there, you are invisible here.
- Rewrite your most important pages so each section answers one question completely.
- Add structured data that states plainly what the business is, what it sells, and where it operates.
- Publish the answers to the questions customers actually ask, in their words rather than your category's vocabulary.
- Work on being mentioned somewhere other than your own site.
Getting a business found in AI search is part of how we handle growth work.
How Grow worksFollow-up
Questions this raises.
- Is AI SEO the same as GEO or AEO?
- Yes. Generative engine optimisation, answer engine optimisation, and AI SEO all describe the same work: being found, understood, and quoted by systems that answer questions instead of listing links. The naming is unsettled because the practice is only a few years old.
- Does AI SEO replace traditional SEO?
- No. Assistants largely read the same crawled, indexed web that search engines built, so technical health and content quality still decide whether you are visible to them. AI SEO is a layer on top of that foundation, not a substitute for it.
- How long does it take to show up in AI answers?
- There is no fixed timeline, and anyone quoting one is guessing. What is observable is that freshness matters: recently updated content appears several times more often than content left alone, which favours a small maintained set of pages over a large neglected one.
- Can I do this myself?
- Much of it, yes. Answering real questions in self-contained sections, keeping content current, and stating plainly what your business does are editorial habits rather than technical ones. The parts that usually need help are the technical foundation and the structured data.
- Can anyone guarantee I will be cited by ChatGPT?
- No. There is no ranking to buy and no position to guarantee — what a model cites shifts between versions, between phrasings of the same question, and between users. Any guaranteed placement is being sold on something that does not exist.