AI SEO
We audit how AI answer engines describe you today, build the strategy that changes it, and do the editorial and earned-media work that gets you cited by name — without giving up a step of ground in traditional search.
See how the engagement works →More and more, a buyer does not receive ten blue links. They receive a paragraph — a recommendation, a head-to-head comparison, a “best option” list — and they act on it without ever clicking through to a search result.
That paragraph is assembled from sources. A handful of brands are in it. Most are not. AI SEO is the discipline of being in it.
It is not blue-link optimization wearing a new name. Rankings are a different game with different physics. What matters here is whether the answer engines pull from you at all — and whether they say your name when they do.
Traditional SEO tries to win the click.
AI SEO tries to win the reference.
When someone asks an assistant “who’s the best firm for this” or “what should we actually do about that,” you want to be one of the sources it draws from. Ideally, the one it names out loud.
And Your Existing SEO
The most common question we get, and a fair one: does chasing AI answers mean giving up on search? No. It means doing the same work properly, and collecting on it twice.
Organizations that ran search and AI visibility as one integrated strategy reported 81% success driving traffic and leads. The ones running them as separate workstreams reported 36%. Splitting them is the losing play, and it has been measured.
One discipline. Two payoffs. Nobody has to choose — and choosing would be the expensive mistake, because you would be paying twice for work that overlaps by more than half.
The Engagement
Plenty of shops will sell you a dashboard and call it a strategy. An audit that tells you you are invisible, with no plan for fixing it, is a diagnosis with no treatment. Four movements, in order.
A baseline of how the answer engines describe you right now — and what they are building that description out of.
You do not win AI search. You win one question, then another. This is where we decide which ones.
The part most audits hand back to you. We do it. This is a storytelling firm, and the thing that moves the needle is storytelling.
The same prompts, re-run on a fixed cadence. Counting the thing that actually matters.
Why This Works
Sources: Muck Rack analysis of 25M+ links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini across 17 industries (May 2026) · pre-registered randomized field experiment, 1,065 US users (Jan–Feb 2026) · Semrush ghost-citations study, 3,981 domain appearances across four AI engines.
That last number is the one nobody sells against. Most tools count links. Almost none count whether a human read your name. We measure the mention.
Fit
This works when
This does not work when
Straight Answers
The work of getting referenced inside AI-generated answers — the recommendations, comparisons and best-option lists people now act on without clicking anything. Traditional SEO tries to win the click. AI SEO tries to win the reference.
Thirty to fifty real buyer questions, run across five answer engines. Who gets named, who gets cited, which sources those answers are assembled from, where you are absent, whether AI crawlers can read your site, and whether the models know who you are. Then a ranked list of the gaps worth closing first.
Sixty to ninety days on narrow, specific questions. Six to twelve months on competitive category terms. Anyone promising faster is selling you something.
Not on the organic side. Paid and advertorial content is about 0.3% of AI citations. Paid placement is a transaction with one publisher; what these models reward is consensus across many publishers who have no relationship with each other. You can rent a headline. You cannot rent a pattern.
No — it finishes it. The same work pays into both, which is why splitting the two is the expensive choice. Organizations running search and AI visibility as one strategy reported 81% success driving traffic and leads; those running them separately, 36%.
The technical hygiene overlaps. The strategy does not. Classic link authority barely registers — more than 90% of the pages Perplexity cites have fewer than ten referring domains. What moves this is the pattern of independent sources describing you the same way, which is an editorial problem, not a technical one.
Because the highest-leverage input is earned media, and earning coverage is a newsroom skill. We spent two decades on the receiving end of pitches, deciding which ones were worth airing. We know what makes something citable, because we used to be the ones deciding.
Most companies have never looked. The answer is usually more surprising than the fix.
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