More and more people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini instead of Google — and Google itself now puts AI answers above the results. AI visibility is the work that gets your business mentioned in those answers. It is also called GEO: generative engine optimization.
How it differs from ordinary SEO
SEO is about a position in a list. An AI answer has no list: there is one answer, and you are either named in it or you are not.
That changes what matters:
- Quotability over ranking. A language model lifts a sentence out of your site. That sentence has to stand up on its own, without the rest of the page.
- Corroboration elsewhere. One site saying you exist is a claim. Three places saying the same thing is a fact — that is how it reads to a model.
- Structure over keywords. A question as the heading, the answer in the first sentence under it. Dull to write, easy to quote.
What it actually involves
- Question-and-answer structure. Every service page answers the questions people really ask, in their words.
- Schema markup. Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ. This is the machine-readable version of what the page already says.
- Consistent business details. The same name, address and email address everywhere. Differences make you unreliable to a system that cannot check.
- llms.txt. A small text file describing who you are in plain language. It is a proposal, not a standard; here is what it is and isn't.
- Numbers of your own. Something only you measured, with the date and the method. That is what a model quotes, because it exists nowhere else.
What nobody can promise
A place in an AI answer. Not me, and not the agency that promises it anyway. These systems change every month and no vendor offers guarantees.
What I can guarantee: a site built so that it is possible. And it is not wasted work if it does not land — the same work improves your ordinary Google visibility, because both want the same thing: clear structure, speed, and pages that genuinely answer the question.
Should you do this now?
If your site is still slow, has no clear structure or does not explain what you do: start there. AI visibility is the last brick, not the first.
If that is all in place, this is the moment when it is cheap and almost nobody is doing it.
More on what I do here is on the AI visibility page.