A potential customer opens ChatGPT and types: “Who are the best accountants in Brisbane?”
The AI gives a confident answer.
It names two or three businesses.
The customer calls the first one.
Your business isn’t mentioned.
Not because you’re not good enough. But because the AI doesn’t know you exist in a way it can repeat with confidence.
That’s the gap traditional SEO doesn’t cover. And most businesses haven’t noticed it yet.
This article explains both search rulesets… the one most businesses know, and the one most are ignoring. What each one involves, where they overlap, and what it actually takes to show up in both.
Search Has Always Changed. The Pattern Is Always the Same.
Search has been reshaping itself since it existed.
And every time it changes, the same thing happens: most businesses scramble to catch up, and a smaller group who moved early pull ahead and stay ahead.
PageRank rewarded links over keyword stuffing.
Businesses that understood that early built authority that lasted years.
Mobile search reshuffled local visibility overnight. The businesses that optimised for mobile in 2011 and 2012 took positions that their slower competitors spent years trying to close.
AI-generated answers are the latest version of this shift.
Not a replacement for what came before. Google still handles far more searches than any AI platform, and that’s not changing soon.
But a growing slice of the research-and-recommendation phase of a buying journey is now happening on AI platforms before a traditional search engine gets involved.
The businesses that get their heads around this now will have the same advantage early mobile adopters had.
The ones that wait will spend the next few years playing catch-up.
What Traditional SEO Is AND Where It Falls Short
Traditional SEO is about earning higher rankings on Google. It works through a set of signals most marketers now know well: the quality and quantity of links pointing to your site, how well your content is structured for target keywords, your site’s technical health, and how much genuine authority you’ve accumulated over time.
It’s a slow build.
Businesses with years of content and strong backlink profiles tend to dominate. New entrants have a hard time competing with that history. That’s both traditional SEO’s strength and its limitation. It rewards persistence, but it rewards those who started early most of all.
For most of the history of search, that was enough.
Someone asked Google a question, Google served ten results, they clicked one. Rankings equalled traffic.
Two things have disrupted that chain.
First: a lot of Google searches now end without a click. Users get their answer from a featured snippet, a knowledge panel, or increasingly from a Google-generated AI summary at the top of the page. You can rank well and still get less traffic than you used to. Research consistently shows zero-click searches now account for well over half of all Google queries in the US; and that share keeps rising.
Second: some searches are skipping Google entirely. The research questions “who should I hire” , “what’s the best option for X” are increasingly going to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and similar tools first. And those platforms don’t show a list of results. They give one answer.
Either you’re in it or you’re not.
Ahrefs found in late 2025 that nearly a third of ChatGPT’s most-cited pages had no meaningful Google ranking at all.
Ranking and being cited by AI are two completely separate things.
That’s the core problem with relying on traditional SEO alone. It was built for a world where search meant a ranked list.
But it no longer has a monopoly on how people find businesses.
What AI SEO Actually Means
Before going further: AI SEO does not mean using AI tools to produce content faster. That’s a workflow decision. It has nothing to do with whether an AI engine will recommend your business.
AI SEO, more specifically called Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is about being cited, recommended, and surfaced by AI systems. The goal isn’t a ranking position. It’s inclusion in a generated answer.
GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation
GEO covers platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. These systems pull from training data, live web content, and authoritative sources to build answers. Your job is to be a source they trust and can read clearly.
AEO: Answer Engine Optimisation
AEO is more specifically about Google’s AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries that appear above organic results for certain queries. It also covers voice search and other zero-click formats.
The goal is to be the answer that gets served, not one of several options below it.
The two disciplines overlap. Strong content structure and demonstrated authority matter for both. But GEO focuses more on how AI models understand who your business is, while AEO focuses on how your content is formatted to appear in answer contexts.
Together, they cover the part of search that traditional SEO doesn’t reach.
Traffic from AI platforms is still small compared to Google. But it’s growing faster than any search channel has grown in years, and the businesses appearing in those citations now are building a head start that’s going to matter.
What AI SEO Actually Involves: Six Things That Move the Dial
There’s no single fix for AI visibility. It comes from several things working together. Here’s what they are, in plain terms.
1. Entity and Brand Building
An AI won’t cite a business it can’t verify. Before it will recommend you, it needs to find consistent, confirmed information about you across sources it trusts: Wikipedia, LinkedIn, industry publications, press coverage, reputable directories.
This is called building your knowledge graph. It’s about making sure the AI can cross-reference who you are across multiple authoritative sources and get the same answer every time. If the picture is inconsistent or thin, the AI will either cite the wrong information or skip you entirely.
2. Structured Data and Schema Markup
Your website probably has good information on it. But if the underlying code doesn’t label that information clearly, AI engines can’t extract it reliably.
Schema markup, specifically JSON-LD, is the technical fix.
LocalBusiness schema tells AI your address, hours, and service area.
FAQ schema formats your Q&A content in a way that maps directly to how AI answers are built.
Most businesses have never implemented this. That gap is one of the most common reasons a site with good content still doesn’t show up in AI results.
3. Website Authority
AI systems cite sources they trust.
The trust signals they use are largely the same ones Google has always used: quality inbound links, depth of expertise in your content, and evidence that other credible sources reference you.
This is why AI SEO and traditional SEO aren’t separate strategies, they share the same foundations. A strong domain authority doesn’t guarantee AI visibility, but low authority makes it very hard to achieve. Honestly, this is where most businesses that skip traditional SEO in favour of “just doing AI SEO” fall over. You can’t shortcut the authority piece.
4. Reviews and Sentiment
AI platforms scan review sites to understand what the market thinks of your business. Google, Trustpilot, Reddit, and industry-specific review platforms all carry weight.
Businesses with strong, consistent reviews across the platforms AI systems actually scrape are more likely to get recommended. Inconsistent or predominantly negative sentiment tends to produce one outcome: the AI doesn’t mention you.
It’s not subtle.
5. Citation Consistency
If your business appears in ten directories with ten slightly different versions of your name, address, or phone number, AI engines face an ambiguity problem. And ambiguous sources don’t get cited.
Fixing this: claiming, standardising, and maintaining your listings across every relevant platform is tedious work.
It’s also the thing most agencies skip because it doesn’t look impressive on a report.
But it has an outsized impact on whether AI systems can confidently reference your business.
6. Conversational Content
People don’t ask AI engines “best accountant Brisbane.”
They ask “Who’s a good accountant on the Sunshine Coast for a small business?”
Content structured around how people actually phrase questions performs better in AI contexts than content built around keyword density.
The technical side matters too… clean HTML structure, semantic markup, pages that AI crawlers can actually navigate.
But the editorial shift is more important for most businesses: write answers, not just content.
What It Looks Like in Practice
Luke Burrell is the AI SEO specialist at Websites That Sell, a Digita Marketing Agency that has been working in this space since GPT-3.5 launched in 2022, before most agencies had even heard the term AI SEO let alone GEO or AEO.
He commented:
“Google and ChatGPT are reading the same website, but they’re looking for completely different things. The businesses that understand that distinction and build for both will have a real advantage over those that treat search as one channel.”
Luke Burrell, AI Search Specialist, Websites That Sell
Websites That Sell’s client data backs that up.
- A national garage door company went from 37 to 995 monthly AI search mentions in six months.
- A skip bin company went from zero to 37 daily ChatGPT mentions in 180 days.
- A skin clinic across four Australian states grew from 391 to 1,190 monthly AI mentions in the same period. A single electrician in Wollongong went from zero to 30 daily Google AI Overview appearances.
The range of industries and business sizes matters.
This isn’t something only large brands with large budgets can do.
The mechanics that drive AI citation: entity clarity, structured data, consistent citations, content structure are available to any business willing to do the work properly.
Who Actually Needs to Do This Now
Not every business needs to prioritise AI SEO today.
Here’s an honest way to think about it.
The key question is: how many questions does your customer need answered before they contact you?
The more questions, the more exposed you are. AI engines are built to answer questions. If your customer’s buying journey is research-heavy, some of that research is already going to AI platforms. You just might not know it yet.
Start now if you’re in:
- Professional services – legal, financial, accounting, medical, consulting. High-trust decisions. Customers research extensively before reaching out. These are exactly the queries AI handles most.
- Healthcare and wellness. People use AI to research symptoms, practitioners, and treatment options constantly. This is one of the most AI-affected search categories there is.
- Trades and local services. More customers are asking ChatGPT for an electrician or plumber recommendation than most trade businesses realise, especially in areas where they have no existing referral network.
- B2B with longer sales cycles. The research phase of a B2B decision is long, question-heavy, and multi-touch. AI platforms are increasingly where that research starts.
Lower urgency, but worth monitoring:
- Pure product retail where decisions are driven by price comparison. AI shopping recommendations are less common and less trusted than AI service recommendations, for now.
- Businesses with very strong brand recognition where customers seek them out by name directly.
Even in lower-urgency categories, the cost of monitoring your AI presence is low.
The cost of ignoring it for two more years and then scrambling is much higher.
How to Pick an AI SEO Agency Without Getting Burned
AI SEO has attracted a lot of opportunism.
The discipline is new, the metrics are unfamiliar, and most business owners don’t yet know what good looks like. That makes it easy for agencies to make claims that sound credible but mean nothing. Here’s what to actually look for.
Ask for real data from real clients.
Not case studies written in vague percentages. Actual data showing AI mention growth over time, with the measurement methodology explained. If an agency can’t show you that from existing clients, they can’t prove their work does anything.
Clarify what they mean by “AI SEO”
Ask directly: what specific work do you do to improve our visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews? If the answer is mostly about producing more content faster using AI tools, that’s not AI SEO. That’s content production. They’re different things.
Find out how they measure success.
Good agencies track brand mentions across AI platforms, source citations, and AI Overview appearances. Vague reporting that bundles AI visibility into general traffic numbers usually means they’re measuring things that don’t tell you whether the AI work is actually working.
Expect months, not weeks.
Building AI visibility takes time. Entity recognition, authority signals, citation consistency; none of it happens overnight. Any agency promising fast results should be asked to explain exactly how. The answer usually reveals whether they know what they’re doing.
Make sure they’re not ignoring your existing SEO.
The foundations of AI SEO and traditional SEO overlap significantly. An agency pitching AI SEO as a standalone service with no reference to your site’s existing technical health and authority should raise a flag. The two work together. An agency that doesn’t understand that probably doesn’t fully understand either.
Why Moving Early Still Matters
In every major search evolution, the businesses that moved early built advantages that took their competitors years to close. That’s not an accident. Authority compounds. The longer a business has been recognised as a trusted source by Google, or by an AI engine. The harder it is for a newcomer to displace.
The businesses dominating traditional search today built their authority years ago. That’s why new entrants struggle so much to compete. AI visibility is heading the same way.
The businesses AI systems currently recognise and cite are building a head start. New entrants will have to work against that accumulated signal.
The window isn’t closed. But it’s the same window that’s always existed in search; open early, narrowing over time. Businesses that treated mobile optimisation as a “not yet” in 2012 paid for it. The same logic applies here, just moving faster.
AI platform adoption has accelerated faster than mobile search did at the equivalent stage. The gap between early movers and late movers is narrowing quicker as a result.
The Practical Starting Point
The businesses that win in search over the next decade aren’t going to be the ones that chose AI SEO over traditional SEO, or vice versa. They’re going to be the ones that understood both rulesets and built for both at the same time.
Traditional SEO still drives the majority of search traffic and will for years. AI SEO covers the part of the buying journey that’s moving onto AI platforms. The two share foundations: authority, content quality, technical structure… so building one strengthens the other.
If you want to know where to start, the honest answer is: schema markup and entity data. Those are the two things most businesses are missing, they have the most direct impact on AI visibility, and they’re the areas most agencies skip because they’re not visible enough to put on a slide deck.
Fix those first.
Then look at citation consistency, content structure, and authority. In that order.
The question isn’t whether your customers are using AI to research businesses like yours.
They already are.
The question is whether they’re finding you when they do.