AI search visibility: get quoted by ChatGPT, Google AI and Perplexity
A growing share of buying questions now get answered without anybody visiting a website. Someone asks an assistant who the good options are, gets three names, and rings one. If you are not one of the three, you never even knew the conversation happened.
What decides whether you get quoted
- Pages that answer a whole question in one place, in plain statements of fact rather than marketing language.
- Structured data that matches what is visible on the page.
- Being mentioned consistently across the sites the models already trust. Directories, reviews, industry bodies.
- A Google Business Profile that is complete and current, because it is where local answers get pulled from.
- There is no submission form and no paid placement. Anyone selling you one is selling something else.
The measurement problem, said plainly
Nobody has a rank tracker for this that works the way rank trackers used to. Answers vary by user, by phrasing and by day, and the platforms publish nothing like Search Console.
What I do instead is sample. Ask the assistants the questions your customers ask, on a schedule, and record what comes back. Whether you appear, how you are described, and whether the description is even right. It is sampling rather than measuring, and it beats guessing.
The first finding is usually an error, not an absence
The model has an old address, the wrong service list, a price from three years ago, or has confused you with a similarly named business across town. That comes from stale pages, thin directory listings and inconsistent details around the web, and it is fixable.
The same fixes make normal search better, which is why this is not really a separate discipline. It is SEO with a different reader in mind.
AI search visibility, straight answers
What is GEO?
Generative engine optimisation. Getting your business surfaced and described correctly by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. It overlaps heavily with good SEO and is not a separate technology.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend me?
No. Nobody controls what an assistant says, there is no paid slot, and answers change between users and over time. What I can do is remove the reasons you are being left out or described wrongly, then check regularly whether it improved.
Is this worth paying for yet?
For most businesses it is worth a small, fixed piece of work rather than a retainer. Establish what the assistants say about you now, fix what is wrong, recheck each quarter. If your category is one people research heavily, it deserves more.
How is this different from SEO?
Same foundations, different reader. SEO aims at a ranked list of links, this aims at being the source an answer is built from. The overlap is big enough that doing both together costs less than doing them separately.
Usually done alongside
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