SEO & AI Search, Because Google Isn't the Only Engine Anymore

Traditional SEO optimizes for a click on a results page — rankings, impressions, click-through rate. GEO and AEO optimize for being the source an AI system cites or recommends when it synthesizes an answer, which is a different mechanism: the AI is summarizing and choosing sources rather than ranking links. Most teams need both, not one instead of the other, because traditional search isn't going away — the metrics simply expanded. Rankings and CTR are still tracked; citation frequency and share of voice inside AI answers are now tracked alongside them.

We start with a baseline audit: running a defined set of real buyer-intent prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews to see which brands, competitors, and sources currently get cited. That establishes a share-of-AI-voice baseline against named competitors. From there we re-run the same prompt set on a recurring cadence and track whether citation frequency and share of voice are actually moving. It's not a rank position, but it is a measurable baseline and a measurable trend, which is more than "trust us" offers.

It's real and worth doing, and it's also not a guaranteed ranking lever — both things are true. llms.txt signals how AI crawlers should treat and attribute your content. It's an emerging practice the industry itself is still standardizing, not a settled convention with predictable results. We implement it as one input among several and say so plainly. Any vendor promising specific outcomes from adding a single file is overselling something that hasn't been standardized yet.

They can run together, and for B2B they often should. Google's AI Overviews appear on a large share of B2B tech queries and measurably reduce paid click-through on the queries where they show up — which means paid and organic/AI-search visibility are competing for the same click, not operating in separate lanes. A brand that shows up inside the AI Overview itself tends to also see stronger paid performance on that same query. Running PPC with no coordination with GEO/AEO means fighting the same battle on two disconnected fronts.

It depends on which visibility gap you're actually solving. A GEO/AEO engagement is scoped against the prompt set and the technical work required to become citable. A technical SEO engagement is scoped against the size and complexity of the site and its vertical. A B2B PPC engagement is scoped against existing spend and how much attribution infrastructure needs building first. We start with an audit — often the honest first step regardless of which path fits — rather than quoting a flat retainer that doesn't reflect the actual work.