TL;DR
AI SEO is the practice of making your brand the source an AI system chooses when it answers a question in your category.
The goal is to be mentioned, cited and linked in AI-generated answers, as well as ranking in the blue links.
The term has a second meaning. Plenty of people search "ai seo" when they mean using AI tools to do SEO work: clustering keywords, writing briefs, running audits.
Both are real, and we cover the second one further down.
This article is mostly about the first.
You will also see a pile of acronyms for the same job:
| Term | What people mean by it |
|---|---|
| AI SEO / AI search optimization | Getting cited and recommended in AI answers |
| GEO (generative engine optimization) | The same thing, named after generative AI |
| AEO (answer engine optimization) | The same thing, named after "answer engines" |
| LLMO (large language model optimization) | The same thing, named after the models |
All four labels describe one job.
We call it AI search, because that is what your customers are using.
As we cover in our deeper guide on what Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) actually is, true GEO content relies heavily on SEO fundamentals. Generative engine crawlers find your content so it can be cited or linked to by authoritative third-party sources. It answers questions definitively rather than optimizing around keyword density.
Whatever the label, the work starts with SEO, whether you call it AI SEO, GEO or AEO.
AI SEO is not different from SEO at the foundations.
You cannot do AI SEO without solid SEO underneath it.
Google's guide to optimizing for AI features (last updated July 10, 2026) says those features are "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems." The guide explicitly calls optimizing for them "still SEO."
It also sets a clear entry requirement. To appear in an AI feature, "a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet."
Google has said the same thing on stage and in writing. "Good SEO is good GEO" has been a consistent message from Google, including from John Mueller, Search Advocate:
That's why we say AI SEO starts with SEO. Google has confirmed that AI search fundamentals are still SEO fundamentals.
What changes is the weighting. Some things matter more when the reader is a language model:
| Stays the same | Matters more for AI search |
|---|---|
| Crawlable, indexable, fast pages | Being mentioned on the sites AI systems cite most (YouTube, Reddit, Wikipedia, LinkedIn) |
| Clear site architecture and internal links | Digital PR and high-authority links that put your name in trusted sources |
| Helpful content that answers the query | Content structured so a single passage can be quoted on its own |
| Structured data | A consistent description of who you are, everywhere your brand appears |
| Earning links | Original data and opinions nobody else can publish |
Do SEO first, then AI SEO. Our campaign data below shows why.
We run first-party studies across our client base because most AI search advice is opinion.
Three findings from that work all point back at SEO fundamentals.
1. Tools and templates earn 7.5 times their share of AI traffic:
Interactive tools and templates earned 7.5 times their share of pages in AI referral traffic, the highest of any format. That is across the websites of 500+ businesses and 1.2 million AI referral visits from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot, as detailed in our Format Leverage study.
January to July 2026: Comparison pages, the format most often recommended for AI search, came 5th of 7. And a third of all AI referral traffic landed on product and collection pages.
The popular AI SEO advice does not match what AI actually sends traffic to.
2. AI sends the expensive, considered purchases:
In our study of 100 Australian eCommerce brands, AI-referred customers buying furniture, appliances, fitness equipment and jewelry placed orders worth A$900 to A$2,500. Winning those buyers takes product pages with visible pricing and structured specifications. That is ordinary SEO work, and it lines up with the high-ticket effect we see in AI search.
3. Readable URLs get about 13 times more AI visits per page:
Across more than 500 websites in our analytics data, pages with readable, descriptive URLs received about 13 times more AI referral sessions per page than pages with opaque URLs, after we matched pages on type and site size.
Most opaque URLs sit on cart and account pages, which nobody asks an AI about.
Even so, readable URLs are the pattern to copy, and URL hygiene is about as basic as SEO gets.
We went back through our client campaigns from our case studies and award entries, across nine sectors, to see what the AI winners did differently.
Ten measured a rise in AI search: more AI referral visits, more AI Overview placements, or a bigger share of AI answers.
The rest mostly ran before anyone tracked AI, so they tell us nothing either way.
The ten shared two patterns.
SEO foundations are the gateway to AI SEO.
Nine of the ten ran on-page and content work.
But so did almost every campaign that never measured AI.
Our award winning SEO and AI search case studies show the same split:
| Work in the campaign | 7 with an AI rise | The other 19 |
|---|---|---|
| Technical | 4 | 11 |
| On-page | 6 | 18 |
| Content | 6 | 17 |
Everyone who grows does the foundations.
Content written to be quoted shows up more often in the winners.
Answer-first content, with FAQs and tables, was part of 4 out of 7 campaigns we've won awards for with a measured AI increase, against 6 of the 19 without one.
All ten also tracked AI visibility from the start.
You cannot show an AI result you never measured.
AI SEO adds the work that happens off your website.
An AI answer draws on the whole web, so your own pages are only part of what it reads.
AI assistants cite YouTube, Reddit, Wikipedia and LinkedIn heavily.
You are absent from the answer when your category's conversation happens there without you.
Show up where your buyers talk, and bring real expertise. Reddit's influence on SEO and AI search is one of the clearer examples.
A mention in a publication the model already trusts does more than a pile of links from sites it ignores.
Digital PR puts your name inside the sources AI systems quote. That is how digital PR builds brand presence in AI Overviews.
Genea Fertility, an Australian fertility clinic, shows the pattern.
We turned Genea's own anonymised donor records into a data story, gave it to the Herald Sun's National Health Editor first, and linked every release back to the new donor portal.
The coverage sat on top of a site that could already be crawled, indexed and cited.
Digital PR works best on top of sound SEO.
Cooper & Co, an Australian Shopify furniture and homewares brand, started with an authority score of 14.
The dedicated Cooper & Co digital PR campaign built the authority side alongside SEO.
We rebuilt its collection pages, metadata and product schema while its digital PR campaign built authority in home and interiors media.
AI referral traffic grew more than 10x, non-branded organic clicks grew 103%, and organic revenue grew 125%.
You can listen to our Australian Head of SEO Performance, Charbel Raffoul, talk with Luke Rainsbury, General Manager at Cooper & Co, about the work here: AI Search Rewards the Boring Work.
AI systems answer from what they know about you: the company, the people, the services, the places.
Consistent names, descriptions and structured data across your site and profiles make you easy to identify and hard to confuse. These are the same E-E-A-T signals that help brands get cited in AI answers.
AI answers repeat consensus.
The way into an answer is to be the source of something new: a study, a benchmark, a strong opinion with evidence.
The model hedges when ten sites describe you ten different ways. One clear description of who you serve and what you do, repeated everywhere, gives the model one thing to say.
Social posts get indexed, quoted and summarized.
They also build the brand searches that tell search engines and AI systems you are real.
Write sections that make sense on their own.
Answer the question in the first sentence, use tables for comparisons, and keep each passage self-contained, because AI systems quote single passages.
That is the core of optimizing content for AI search.
Sylvane, a US air quality and home comfort retailer with over 25 years in the market, is the clearest example from our own work.
Sylvane's brand mentions in AI answers rose 621%, and its revenue from AI referrals grew 145% month over month.
The work started as ordinary SEO. First came the foundations: category pages built for high-value searches such as "dehumidifier", structured data, and internal links that move readers from research to purchase. Then came the AI layer: entity-first content, summary blocks and FAQs that AI systems can quote, and a "Sylvane rated" system built as a fresh data set for AI to cite.
The full results are in the Sylvane case study.
Similar patterns show up in the Jaipur Living and SCF campaigns.
ChatGPT sends by far the most AI referral traffic to US websites, and Gemini and Copilot are next.
Perplexity, the engine many AI SEO guides lead with, is fourth.
| AI assistant | Share of AI chatbot referrals to websites, US |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 75.17% |
| Gemini | 13.26% |
| Microsoft Copilot | 6.64% |
| Perplexity | 3.02% |
| Claude | 1.81% |
Source: Statcounter, AI chatbot market share, United States, September 2026.
No. But the gap is narrower than it was a year ago.
OpenAI's consumer product lead Adam Fry said in late 2026 that ChatGPT's volume of search-like queries is now roughly one-fifth the volume of queries Google handles. That figure comes from OpenAI and has not been independently verified. It also counts every prompt that triggers a web search, which is broader than a keyword search.
Google still dominates overall search volume and referral traffic. ChatGPT's growth is real, though, and it is concentrated on informational and research-style queries where an answer can replace a click.
The practical point is simpler than the headline. Brands that only optimize for Google are missing a growing share of discovery. Brands that ignore Google fundamentals still fail on both.
Google's own AI features sit alongside these. AI Overviews show inside normal results, and AI Mode began rolling out to everyone in the US on May 20, 2025.
They reduce clicks on simple informational queries and reward pages that answer clearly and can be cited.
AI Overviews appear above traditional results for many informational searches. When the overview fully answers the question, organic click-through rates drop. Google AI Mode takes this further: it is a conversational interface that surfaces fewer traditional links and relies more on cited sources. The practical approaches are covered in our guides to ranking in Google's AI Mode and optimizing for AI Overviews.
The impact is uneven. High-intent commercial and transactional queries still send traffic. Informational and research queries are more likely to be answered inside the AI surface.
What still works:
The fundamentals have not changed. Technical health, useful content, and authority still determine whether your pages are eligible to be cited. The difference is that fewer people now click to verify the answer themselves.
AI Mode and AI Overviews run many searches for one question.
Google describes a "query fan-out" technique: the system issues multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources, then builds one answer from what it finds (Google Search Central).
We ran "what is ai seo" through a fan-out tool for this article.
One search became 120 related questions in eight groups, from definitions and how-to guides to tools, Google's rules, results and cost.
Some of those answers can be gamed with hacks:
Source: StudioHawk, query fan-out run on "what is ai seo" (SEOtesting, Oct 29, 2026)
Your page competes on all 120 questions, so the depth of your topic coverage decides how many it can answer.
Yes, some AI SEO hacks work, for now.
We know because we tested them.
We still do not build client strategies on them, because they are the keyword stuffing of AI search.
In August 2025, Lawrence Hitches published a "best SEO agencies in Sydney" list on his personal site and included himself.
Within two weeks, the site appeared across AI tools for "best SEO agency Sydney" searches.
To rule out the StudioHawk name doing the work, we repeated it on a brand-new landscaping test site with a "best landscapers in Melbourne" list.
Within two weeks, that list appeared in AI answers too (full write-up on Search Engine Land).
Appearing in an AI answer is easy to fake, so appearing alone proves very little.
The other common tricks:
AI systems do not yet have the spam defenses search engines took decades to build.
That is why these tricks work today.
Google's history tells you how the story ends: tactic after tactic that gamed rankings became a penalty.
Build on the foundations, and you never have to unwind anything.
You measure AI SEO with three numbers: how often you appear in AI answers, how much traffic AI sends you, and whether what AI says about you is right. The practical tracking methods are covered in our guide to AI SEO metrics.
| What to measure | How |
|---|---|
| Visibility in AI answers | Prompt tracking tools such as Peec AI, run against the questions your buyers ask |
| AI referral traffic | GA4, with a channel group or segment for chatgpt.com, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com and perplexity.ai |
| Google AI features | Search Console counts AI Overview and AI Mode traffic inside the normal "Web" search data (Google), so it cannot be separated there |
| Accuracy | Ask the main assistants about your brand each month and log what they get wrong |
No tool sees every conversation.
Prompt tracking is a sample, so track the same questions over time and read the trend.
Compare your share of voice against competitors, and read it alongside your other numbers, because it only works as one signal among several.
The best AI SEO signal sits in your pipeline. When we tracked StudioHawk's own inbound leads between July and December 2025, leads that came through AI search closed in roughly 18 days, against an average of 29 days for SEO leads.
Those buyers arrived already informed, so sales calls skipped the early education. In the first year we tracked AI search, AI-influenced conversations brought in over $100,000 in closed revenue from more than 20 leads in 2025.
Some were traced straight to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Grok (Search Engine Land).
Attribution misses a lot of this.
On Black Friday, a Kadi customer found the brand through ChatGPT, browsed, added three more products, and placed the largest order of the sale.
Analytics credited Instagram.
Track three softer signals too: leads that mention AI tools unprompted, faster closes, and less pushback on price.
The other meaning of AI SEO is using AI tools to do SEO work faster.
We use AI every day for keyword clustering, content briefs, technical audits and internal linking suggestions.
A person still decides what to publish and checks every fact.
Google's position on AI-written content is clear: it rewards helpful content however it is produced, and warns that generative models "may contain inaccuracies" (Google Search Central).
Language models predict the next word, so they can state a wrong fact with confidence.
Use AI to go faster, and keep a person checking the facts.
Start with the SEO foundations, then add the AI layer.
In that order:
If you want a team to do this with you, our AI SEO services start with an audit of exactly these seven steps.
To work through them yourself, download our free AI search whitepaper, a practical guide to ranking in AI search with a checklist of high-impact fixes.
AI SEO and GEO are the same job under different names. GEO (generative engine optimization), AEO and LLMO all describe getting your brand cited in AI-generated answers.
The distinctions between SEO, GEO and AEO are smaller than the labels suggest.
Google penalizes AI-written content only when it is unhelpful or made mainly to manipulate rankings, the same rule it applies to any content. Accuracy and quality are what count.
AI SEO usually shows early movement in AI visibility within a few months, because AI answers draw on content that already exists. Foundations and off-site authority take longer, and they are what make the gains last.
A small business can do AI SEO, and it starts in the same place as any business: a technically sound site, clear service pages, a Google Business Profile, reviews, and one consistent description of what you do.
You do not need llms.txt to appear in Google's AI features.
Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimizations to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
Adding one does no harm: we have seen no significant upside or downside from it. More detail on llms.txt.