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AI Search Optimization

If someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews who solves their problem and you're not the answer, you've lost the deal before your site ever comes up. We track what your buyers actually ask, check how AI describes you, read what AI agents fetch from your site, and build the presence that gets you cited, tied back to the leads it produces.

What AI Search optimization looks like for our clients

Noa Notes, Jameda's AI documentation assistant, inside a doctor's patient record
Noa NotesB2B SaaS · digital health platform

Noa Notes, Jameda's AI assistant for clinical documentation, is part of Docplanner's platform for doctors and patients.

First 6 months
  • 11% → 38.5%AI Search visibility (non-branded prompts)
  • 8% → 57%Retrieved as an AI source
  • #5 → #3AI Search competitor set

Why AI Search matters now

B2B or B2C, your buyers now ask an AI about your category before they ask you.

Buyers check AI before anyone talks to youBuyers check AI first

Whether it's a buying committee comparing vendors or a shopper comparing products, everyone checks ChatGPT or Gemini first, before they ever reach you.

AI Overviews already sit inside everyday searchAI Overviews are the default

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode sit inside the results people use every day. That's the default now, not an option to opt into.

Enterprises carry B2C-scale exposure tooEnterprises face B2C too

A consumer-facing bank or insurer meets the same AI-driven research habits as any B2C brand, just at far bigger scale.

Falling behind reaches the board, quietlyFalling behind reaches the board

It rarely looks like a dramatic drop. You lose the recommendation moment first, a discovery-layer gap that isn't a line item you can defer.

What we do as your AI Search agency

A tool gives you a dashboard. We set the tracking up properly, read what it says, turn it into a list of work, and then do the work.

  1. Monitoring

    We track the questions that carry revenue, not the ones with search volume

    There is no reliable search volume for prompts, so we build your prompt set from what buyers actually say: sales calls, reviews, support tickets and Search Console. We expand it into the fan-out queries an engine runs on its own and track it every day in the engines your buyers use, so the numbers describe your market rather than a keyword tool's guess at it.

    More on AI visibility monitoring →

    Built from what your buyers already say

    • Sales calls
    • Customer interviews
    • Reviews
    • Support tickets
    • Search Console

    Tracked daily in the engines your buyers use

    • Google AI Overviews and AI Mode
    • ChatGPT
    • Perplexity
    • Gemini
    • Claude
    • Microsoft Copilot

    Read as numbers you can report upward

    • Visibility: how often you are named
    • Citations and share of voice: how often your pages are the source
    • Position: where you land when you are mentioned
    • Competitors: who gets named in your place
  2. Brand perception

    We check what AI says about you, and whether it is true

    For a large brand, being mentioned is rarely the problem. The problem is an answer that quotes last year's pricing, names a product you retired, or tells a buyer you only serve small companies. We read the answers for facts, tone and the objections they raise, trace each wrong statement back to the page it came from, and get that page corrected, on your own site or wherever it lives.

    More on brand perception →

    Facts checked against your own sources

    Pricing
    Plans, tiers and what they include
    Products
    Current names, nothing discontinued
    Reach
    Markets, languages and locations
    Company
    Size, ownership and certifications

    Perception compared with your competitors

    • Sentiment
    • What you are known for
    • Objections it raises
    • Consistency across engines

    When it is wrong we fix the source

    • Find the page the wrong claim was cited from
    • Correct it on your own site first
    • Get profiles, listings and third-party articles updated
    • Re-check the prompt until the answer changes
  3. Agent analytics

    We read your server logs to see what AI agents actually fetch

    Prompt tracking shows the answers. Your server logs show the other side: which AI bots visit, which pages they fetch and which ones they never reach. A training crawler, a search indexer and an assistant opening a page because someone just asked a question are three different signals, so we keep them apart. What comes out is a short list: the content AI keeps coming back to and deserves more of, the topics it ignores, and the errors or blocks that keep a page from being cited at all.

    More on agent analytics →

    Three kinds of visit read separately

    Training
    Collects text to train future modelsGPTBotClaudeBotCCBot
    Search
    Decides which pages can be cited at allOAI-SearchBotPerplexityBotClaude-SearchBot
    Live fetch
    Someone asked, and the assistant opened your pageChatGPT-UserPerplexity-UserClaude-User

    What we take from it and put on your roadmap

    • Which pages AI fetches most, and which it never reaches
    • Which topics to build more of, and which to stop
    • Errors and redirects served to AI crawlers
    • robots.txt and CDN rules that shut out the wrong bots
  4. Execution

    Then we do the work the data points to

    Every finding above becomes an item on your roadmap, and our team ships it: technical fixes so AI crawlers can reach and parse your pages, content structured so an engine can lift the answer, and work off your site wherever the citations in your category actually come from. Which platforms matter is a finding from your data, never a default.

    Let's talk about your AI visibility →

    On your site the surface you control

    • Fix rendering, markup and schema so crawlers can parse your pages
    • Rewrite existing pages into answers an engine can lift
    • Create new content for the prompts you are missing

    Off your site where your category gets cited

    • YouTube, LinkedIn and Reddit
    • Review platforms like G2 or OMR Reviews
    • Inclusion in the third-party lists engines cite

How we measure whether AI Search is working

We track your AI visibility score just as closely as the leads it produces, since looking at only one tells half the story.

Visibility

  • AI Search visibility: how often you're named
  • Citation rate & share of voice: how often you get cited
  • Sentiment: what AI models say about you
  • Position: where you land when mentioned
  • AI Search visibility · how often named
  • Citation share & SOV · how often cited
  • Sentiment · what AI says about you
  • Position · rank when mentioned

Leads

  • Self-reported field: "how did you hear about us," with an AI option
  • AI-referral sessions: GA4 traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Copilot
  • Branded-search lift: Search Console demand after citations rise
  • Sales: your sales team asking on a call
  • Self-reported field · AI option in forms
  • AI-referral sessions · GA4 traffic
  • Branded-search lift · Search Console
  • Sales · asking on a call

More on AI Search, from people who study it closely

Niklas Buschner hosts Masters of Search, more than 45 episodes with operators in AI Search and SEO. What they say feeds directly into how our team runs accounts.

Questions we get about AI Search

From AEO versus GEO to what happens when an engine gets your facts wrong.

Is AI Search different from SEO, or just SEO with a new name?

Both, honestly. We think of them as two gears turning together, not two separate services. SEO fundamentals, being the best answer on the open web, are the base gear. Turn it, and it drives a second one: whether ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews cite you for the question you'd want to own. On top of that sit a handful of initiatives built specifically to turn that AI-visibility gear faster: a real, validated prompt set, tracked to see which sources actually get cited, then work placed exactly where those citations land, whether that's your own site, a YouTube video, or a review platform. AI Search is grounded in fundamentals we've run since 2013, technical health, genuinely being the best answer on a topic. But it also opens surfaces SEO never had to touch on its own, and comes with an attribution problem SEO never had either, since last-click reporting simply doesn't see an AI recommendation. Anyone who tells you it's identical to SEO, or a completely separate discipline, is oversimplifying to sell you something.

Do you work with large organizations and enterprise accounts?

Yes, and it's a focus we're actively growing. Large organizations research differently: several people across a buying committee independently ask the same category question, not just one champion, so visibility has to hold up across all of them, not a single journey. We work alongside whatever internal team or agency of record you already have, inside your existing tools and approval process, rather than asking you to route everything through us. The one thing that doesn't change with company size: we still commit to a concrete goal and report against it the same way.

Who actually runs my account, a senior team or a junior account manager?

A senior team, the whole way through. There's no senior-in-the-pitch, junior-in-delivery handoff here: a senior strategist owns your account from day one, works inside your own Slack or Teams, and stays hands-on for as long as we work together. The same senior person builds your prompt set and reads the results, not a junior translating it back to you afterward.

Is AI Search its own service, and what does it cost?

It's part of the same Growth Partnership retainer, starting at €7k a month. We don't think SEO and AI Search should be split into separate line items, since the work genuinely overlaps. For something narrower, a YouTube optimization push, say, we also run fixed-scope projects instead, priced separately and over a shorter, one-off timeline rather than an ongoing retainer.

What's the difference between AEO and GEO?

Not much in practice. Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization are two names for the same shift: getting cited inside an AI-generated answer instead of ranking a blue link. Both also point at the same underlying mechanic, an engine expanding your buyer's question into several fan-out queries and pulling sources for each one. We use "AI Search" as our umbrella term because it's what buyers actually type into Google, but we track the same thing whichever label you prefer.

Which AI engines do you track and optimize for?

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, tracked through an AI visibility tool, but the mix always follows where your buyers actually search. A company whose customers live in the Microsoft ecosystem is far more likely to ask Copilot than Perplexity, so Copilot gets weighted accordingly. A consumer brand with a younger audience often sees more volume in Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT than anywhere else. We read that from your own prompt data rather than assuming one engine matters more than another.

What do you do when an AI engine says something wrong about us?

We find where it came from first. An answer that gets your pricing, your product names or your markets wrong is almost always repeating a source: an old page on your own site, a review profile nobody updated, a directory listing or an article from two years ago. We check the sources the engine cited for that prompt, correct your own pages first, get the third-party ones updated where we can, and keep re-running the prompt until the answer changes. Tone works the same way: if an engine keeps raising the same objection, there is usually a thread or a review behind it that is worth answering.

Do you need access to our server logs?

For the agent analytics, yes, or at least to the part of them that comes from AI bots. That can be the access logs from your server, your CDN or your hosting provider, or a small job that forwards only the lines from known AI user agents. For each request we need the time, the page, the status code and the user agent. Visitor IP addresses are not needed for this. If your CDN already keeps these logs, that is usually the quickest way in.

How fast do you see results?

Faster than classic SEO in some cases, and that's the real difference. A content plan can take months to show up in Google rankings, and that's fine, it's exactly why we still run SEO: once a page ranks, it tends to keep earning for years. AI Search doesn't always follow that same timeline: when our client Heyflow's existing YouTube videos got new titles, descriptions and chapters, citations started climbing within days on content that had been sitting untouched for years. Other moves take longer to compound, our client deeploi's AI Search visibility went from 0% to about 20% over four months, and Heyflow's overall visibility climbed from single digits to over 50% across six months. It depends on how much trusted content and off-site presence already exists, and the biggest early wins usually come from work you've already done that nobody optimized for AI Search yet.

Do you guarantee a specific visibility score or ranking?

No, and anyone who promises a 100% guarantee on a ranking or visibility score is selling you something, not measuring it. What we do instead: before any engagement starts, we run a completely free strategy session using your own live data, current visibility, competitors, and where you actually stand today. Based on that status quo, our experience with similar accounts, and the specific initiatives we plan to run, we define a concrete goal for what we'll reach by a set point in the partnership, and we commit to it. We can't guarantee the outcome, nobody honestly can, but we throw everything we have at hitting it, and we stay transparent about where we stand against it the whole way through.

Does AI Search replace SEO, or run alongside it?

Alongside it, on the same team, from the same content. The work that earns rankings in Google is largely the work that earns citations in ChatGPT and Perplexity: a technically sound site, genuinely useful content, and a clear answer to the question someone's actually asking. Where the two diverge is the off-site layer, the review platforms, YouTube, and community threads AI engines lean on more heavily than classic search results ever did.

Do you also work with review platforms, LinkedIn, Reddit and YouTube directly?

Yes, wherever the data says that's where the citations actually are. We don't run all four for every account by default. We read your prompt data first, see which sources these engines are actually pulling from in your category, and act on whichever combination, a review platform like OMR Reviews, an existing YouTube library, LinkedIn, Reddit, or outreach into the roundups your buyers already read, genuinely shows up in the answers.

Check your own organic growth potential

  1. 1Free instant auditRun a 60-second check on your SEO & AI Search visibility.
  2. 230-minute intro callWe map your goals and give a first read on opportunities.
  3. 3Deep-dive + growth plan90-minute free deep dive on your growth levers.
Book meeting
  • Jessica Ehrhardt
    Jessica Ehrhardt
    Chief Growth Officer
    Obsessionrocycle
    In Search since2021
  • Nina Grimmeiß
    Nina Grimmeiß
    Growth Account Executive
    Obsessionnyc
    In Search since2023