AI SEO is the practice of getting your brand found by search engines and cited by AI answers. It keeps everything that classic SEO does well, then adds a second target: the answers that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews write when your customers ask them who to trust.
That one sentence is the whole field. The rest of this guide unpacks what actually changes, what the industry jargon means, and what to do first.
// Why a New Discipline Exists
Search behaviour split. Google and Bing still decide most commercial discovery, but a growing share of buying decisions now starts inside an AI chat or an AI-generated answer box. Those systems do not show ten links; they synthesise one answer and name a handful of brands. Either you are in that answer or you are invisible to that buyer.
Classic SEO metrics cannot even see this. You can rank position one and still never be mentioned by an AI, because AI systems choose sources differently: they retrieve chunks of content, weigh entity trust, and cite what they can quote cleanly. We broke down the mechanics in crawlers vs LLMs.
// The Jargon, Decoded
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation): optimising to be cited inside AI-generated answers. The deep dive is our complete GEO guide.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation): the older cousin, focused on direct-answer surfaces like featured snippets and answer boxes. Increasingly merged into GEO.
LLM SEO / LLMO / AI visibility: more labels for the same shift. Vendors coin acronyms; the work underneath is shared.
All of them reduce to four jobs: be readable by machines, be trusted as an entity, be quotable in chunks, and be vouched for by third parties.
// The Four Jobs of AI SEO
1. Be readable. AI retrieval bots are less patient than Googlebot. Slow pages, JavaScript-hidden content and wasted crawl budget take you out of the game before it starts.
2. Be trusted. Machines cross-check who you are across your schema, your site and the wider web. Contradictions cost citations; verified facts earn them. This is search grounding and entity work.
3. Be quotable. AI reads in chunks, not pages. Direct answers first, one idea per section, tables for comparisons: the format rules live in the BLUF protocol and vector payload engineering.
4. Be vouched for. AI recommends brands that trusted third parties already cite: directories, reviews, industry publications, real client footprints. No amount of on-site work substitutes for this.
// What It Is Not
AI SEO is not a replacement for SEO, not a trick, and not a tool subscription. Rankings and citations feed each other, which is why treating them as separate projects fails; we mapped that dependency in the dual pipeline and the strategic shift in old search vs AI search.
If you want the buying-side version of this page (what an engagement looks like, what it costs, what proof exists), that is our AI SEO agency page. If you want to know where you stand today, start with the free visibility audit.