Service 06 / Search Visibility
Getting found when the answer isn't a list of links.
More searches now end with a generated answer instead of ten blue links. If that answer never mentions your business, the search is over before you had a chance to appear in it.
The friction
The part most agencies won't tell you
Research into how these systems choose sources shows a consistent bias toward earned media; independent, third-party sources; over content a business publishes about itself.
On-page work alone will not get you cited
A lot of what is sold as GEO is schema, headings, an FAQ block and a file called llms.txt. Those help. They are not sufficient, and anyone selling them as sufficient is either not measuring or not saying.
Content genuinely worth citing
Original data, specific answers, real examples. This is the part that cannot be shortcut.
A consistent business identity
The same name and the same description everywhere it appears. Entity ambiguity is resolved badly by these systems.
Third-party presence
Directories, publications, mentions you did not write. The hardest, the slowest, and the most important.
The scope
The work
Defined before work starts. Documented when we hand it over.
- 01Content structured to be extracted; direct answers first, then detail
- 02Entity consistency: one business name, one description, everywhere it appears
- 03Structured data describing what is genuinely on the page
- 04Crawler access for Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot
- 05Freshness discipline; real publication and update dates, reviewed quarterly
- 06Named authorship, because anonymous content builds no authority
- 07Third-party presence where it is genuinely available
- 08Citation monitoring; quarterly checks in AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search and Perplexity, documented
How we think about it
How we measure it
Reporting for AI visibility is genuinely immature. What is available: Bing Webmaster Tools, which is the best current window into Copilot-style citation; Search Console AI performance reporting where available to the property; and manual citation checks.
The manual check is unglamorous and it is the most honest signal available. We ask the actual systems the actual questions our customers ask, quarterly, and record what comes back; including the questions where we do not appear.
On llms.txt: it is a proposed standard, it is fine to publish, and we will if you want it. It is not a Google ranking factor and no major AI system has confirmed it as a requirement. We will not put it on an invoice as "AI optimization," because it is not.
The connected system
Where this sits in the system
- 01
Website
- 02
Visibility
You are here - 03
Tracking
- 04
Follow-up
No lock-in
You own it.
Your content, your site, your accounts. As with everything else we build.
Related
Questions
How do I get my business cited by ChatGPT?
By being a source worth citing and being consistently identifiable. In practice: content that answers real questions completely, a business identity that is the same everywhere it appears, and third-party presence. There is no submission form and no shortcut.
Will AI search kill my traffic?
It will change it. Informational searches that used to produce a click now often end in an answer. Searches with commercial intent; someone who needs a roof repaired now; still produce clicks, because they need to contact someone. Service businesses are less exposed than publishers.
Is this different from SEO?
It overlaps substantially; both need crawlable, credible, well-structured content. It differs in emphasis: SEO optimises to be listed, this optimises to be quoted. Entity consistency and third-party presence matter more here.
Can you guarantee I will appear in AI answers?
No. These systems do not publish their selection criteria and results vary between users and over time. Anyone guaranteeing this is guessing.
Should I do this instead of local SEO?
No; alongside, and usually after. If you are not showing up in map results yet, fix that first. That is a bigger, more reliable source of calls today.
Start a project
Let's see whether you show up at all.
We'll ask the systems your customers ask, record what comes back, and tell you what's worth doing about it.