--- title: "AI Search Optimisation that gets your brand understood, cited and chosen" canonical: "https://firecask.com/services/marketing/ai-search-optimisation/" author: FireCask description: "AI Search Optimisation led by Alex Moss, Principal SEO at Yoast. Get your brand understood, cited and recommended in ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews." --- People now ask assistants, not just search engines. We make sure the answer they get includes you, without throwing away the SEO that already works. FireCask has been doing SEO since 2013, and for most of that time visibility meant a position on a results page. That has changed more in the last two years than in the ten before it. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini now answer the question before anyone clicks, and increasingly they compare, recommend and even buy on someone's behalf. Our AI Search Optimisation work is led by our co-founder [Alex Moss](/about/#team), Principal SEO at Yoast, who writes about AI search for Search Engine Journal and co-hosts the monthly [SEO Update by Yoast](/podcasts/). We try everything on our own sites first, so the advice you get comes from people doing it rather than reading about it.

Talk to us about AI search

## The Zero-Click economy is already here. Search for almost anything today and you'll scroll past ads, Google's own products and an AI-generated answer before you reach an organic link. Click-through rate was always a proxy for whether people found you. Now that the answer often arrives without a click, the proxy is broken. What matters is whether you're in the answer: mentioned, cited, recommended. That is what we optimise for. ## AI Search Optimisation is still SEO You'll hear it called GEO, AEO, LLMO and AIO. We won't add another acronym to the pile. When Google and Bing explain how to appear in AI-powered search, their advice is consistent, and any SEO would recognise it: - **Fast, well-built sites:** Assistants still crawl, render and follow links. If a page is hard to fetch, it's hard to cite. - **Solid structured data:** Clear entities and the relationships between them, so a machine knows exactly who you are and what you offer. - **Brand perception:** What other people say about you, in reviews, in the press and in communities, feeds straight into what an assistant says about you. - **Unique, useful content:** Written for people, with enough substance that it adds something an assistant can't get anywhere else. What has changed is the audience. The web has split in two: the human web and the agentic web. Both now read your site, and they don't read it the same way. Our job is to serve both. ## Our AI Search Optimisation services - **AI visibility audit:** Where you appear today across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews and AI Mode, which competitors are cited instead of you, and why. - **Entities and structured data:** A connected schema.org graph with stable identifiers, tied to the profiles and records that prove who you are. Ambiguity leads to hallucination, and if an assistant can misread you, at some point it will. - **Content that survives being chunked:** Content isn't only crawled now. It's split into passages and tokenised, so we make every page concise, specific and easy to quote, and cut the filler we call tokenisation spam. - **Agentic readiness:** Access for AI crawlers and agents, content that doesn't depend on JavaScript to appear, clean markdown versions of key pages, an llms.txt file that tells assistants what's on the site, and the discovery files agents look for. - **Brand and third-party perception:** Working with our [digital PR team](/services/marketing/digital-pr/) on coverage, reviews and citations, because an assistant trusts what others say about you more than what you say about yourself. - **Agentic commerce optimisation:** For online shops, product data that agents can compare and buy from: Merchant Center feeds, product schema, and the conversational details (questions, compatibility, substitutes) that Google's UCP and OpenAI's ACP rely on. ## Short-term wins sound like black hat Every big shift in search brings someone promising a guaranteed way to rank in it, and AI is no different. These platforms are young and still closing loopholes, and they'll close them faster than Google ever did, because the models keep getting better at telling what's honest. We don't sell tricks. Everything we do for AI visibility is also good for your organic search, your customers and your brand, so none of it has to be undone when the platforms change their minds. ## Data integrity is the new technical SEO The biggest threat to being understood by AI is ambiguity. If an assistant can misread who you are or what you sell, at some point it will. So we treat the job as maximising data integrity, across the five layers below. schema.org covers the first four. The fifth, perception, you earn through what others say about you. Alex set this out in more detail in [Why Data Integrity Is The New Technical SEO](/blog/why-data-integrity-is-the-new-technical-seo-from-crawling-to-trust/), his column for Search Engine Journal. ## What we report on Rankings and clicks still matter. Alongside them, we report on what visibility looks like inside AI answers: | What we used to report | What we report now | | --- | --- | | Rankings | Mentions and citations | | Links | Citations across channels | | Keywords | Intent | | Share of the results page | Share of voice | | Brand | Brand and sentiment | AI visibility tools are still early, and we'll be straight with you about what they can and can't measure. We combine them with Search Console, analytics and your own sales data, so the picture is honest rather than flattering. ## We build for both audiences ourselves This website is built the way we'd build yours. Every article has a markdown version an assistant can read without picking apart a web page, our structured data is published as one connected graph, and an llms.txt file sets out what's here. If we wouldn't do it on our own site, we won't recommend it for yours. ## Work with us AI Search Optimisation works best alongside traditional SEO, so most clients combine it with our [SEO services](/services/marketing/seo/). We start with an AI visibility audit, agree what success looks like for your business, then work through the fixes in order of impact.

Get in touch

## AI Search Optimisation FAQs ### Is AI Search Optimisation worth it? If your customers use ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews to research what they buy, yes. Those answers already shape decisions before anyone visits a website. The earlier you're part of them, the harder you are to displace. ### Is AI replacing SEO? No. The foundations are the ones search engines have asked for all along, and assistants still rely on search indexes to find what they cite. What has changed is how success is measured and who is reading your site. ### What's the difference between SEO and AI Search Optimisation? Traditional SEO earns positions and clicks on a results page. AI Search Optimisation earns mentions, citations and recommendations inside an AI-generated answer. Most of the work overlaps. AI Search Optimisation adds more attention to entities, to what others say about you, and to how your content reads once it's been broken into passages. ### What are AI SEO, GEO, AEO and LLMO? Different names for the same idea: being visible in AI-generated answers. AI SEO, generative engine optimisation, answer engine optimisation and LLM optimisation all describe work we include under AI Search Optimisation. ### Do I need an llms.txt file? It's a proposed standard rather than an agreed one, and not every platform reads it yet. It's cheap to add and does no harm, so we usually recommend it, alongside the structured data and crawlable content that matter more. ### Can you guarantee we'll appear in ChatGPT? No, and be wary of anyone who does. What an assistant says changes with every model update and every question. We improve the odds by making your brand easy to understand, easy to verify and well regarded, and we measure whether it's working.