What is AI visibility?
Also called AEO or AIO — answer-engine optimisation. Being cite-able by the AI tools that increasingly stand between your customers and your website.
SEO vs AIO
SEO is about ranking a page on Google. AIO is about being one of the small handful of sources an AI model quotes when it writes the answer. There's overlap — but the rules, signals and winners are different.
Why now
Google's AI Overviews already sit above blue links for millions of queries. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot answer billions of prompts a month. For a growing share of those, the user never clicks through — the answer is the destination.
What engines reward
Clear, structured, question-shaped content. Schema. Named entities. Consistent citations across the web. Genuine authority signals — reviews, mentions, directory presence. And answers that a model can lift cleanly.
Where most sites fail
Long, meandering pages with buried answers. Missing or broken structured data. Inconsistent NAP and citations. No FAQ or Q&A layer. Content that's optimised for humans and Google but never for a language model reading the page.
A quick vocabulary check
Answer-engine (or AI-engine) optimisation. Getting cited by AI answers.
A tool that writes answers instead of listing links: ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews.
The named source an AI credits inside its answer — the modern equivalent of a #1 ranking.
The set of real prompts your buyers use to research a category.
The % of relevant prompts across engines where you're cited.
Structured data on your page that helps machines understand what's what.