AI SEO Agency

AI SEO is the proactive work involved in making your business easy for AI platforms to find, understand, trust and recommend. That covers LLMs like Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude. You’ll also hear AI SEO called GEO (generative engine optimisation) or AEO (answer engine optimisation). This is largely because no one has been able to agree on what their favourite terminology for it is, and so we now suffer death by acronym.

In practice, they all mean the same thing:
– Technical SEO work so that AI crawlers can actually read your website properly.
– Content that answers the questions your buyers ask or provides new and useful information.
– Structured data so AI-searchable crawlers can understand the context of pages.
– Creating a consistent and strategic entity. An entity is basically your business’s entire digital footprint.
– Digital PR so that you are helping create and reinforce trust through others vouching for you.

Then we track how often it talks about you, the commercial impact on your business, and whether any of it changes what AI says about you.

It’s like traditional SEO with bells and whistles.

In short, an AI SEO agency tracks how AI platforms describe your business, fixes what’s stopping them from recommending you, and measures whether it made you any money.

We touch on this more in the previous answer above (so jump up and read that first), but in its simplest terms, a good AI SEO Agency will do 3 things really, really well.

– Measure the landscape: Track how often you appear in AI answers for the prompts that matter, where you sit against competitors, how you’re described, and which sources AI relies on. For ecommerce, that goes down to which products get recommended.
– Fix the things that are most important: Technical issues that block AI crawlers, content gaps, inconsistent entity signals, and thin third-party authority. Although this can be a mammoth job, so prioritisation is your friend and should be based on what is most likely to drive sales.
– Prove it: Tie visibility and actions back to enquiries and sales in your analytics, and be straight about what can and can’t be attributed.

We add a fourth step. We layer on CRO on the pages AI traffic lands on to try and increase the conversion rate of your AI-driven traffic. After all, a recommendation that ends on a slow, confusing page is just a very well-researched bounced session.

Traditional SEO earns you a position in a list of links in the serp results. AI SEO earns you a place in the answer itself, and the two don’t always overlap.

In a study of 15,000 prompts, Ahrefs found that on average only 12% of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot appear in Google’s top 10 for the same prompt. Worth noting, though, Google’s own AI Overviews are more closely tied to rankings.

So going back to the original question, traditional SEO was largely a matching exercise. Pick a search term, build a page for it, earn enough authority to rank, repeat. One query, one page, one position.

AI search works differently. Ask ChatGPT or Google’s AI Mode a question, and it quietly breaks it into several smaller ones, searches for each, pulls passages from different sites, and stitches together a single answer. Your page might supply one paragraph of it, most of it, or none.

Alongside that, AI has its own picture of your business. This is that digital footprint we mentioned previously, or in AI SEO circles, what’s called your entity. That is what you sell, who you sell it to, what you’re known for. It builds that picture from your website and from everything said about you elsewhere, both by you and others. When someone asks for “the best X for Y”, AI is matching the question to the businesses it most clearly associates with X and Y.

So the job shifts from ranking one page for one phrase to being the clearest, most consistently described answer across all the questions around your X or Y. You’re no longer just optimising a page. You’re optimising a reputation, with some very well-organised pages attached.

If all the above answers haven’t convinced you, then look at it like this – the click is getting rarer, and the answer is doing more of the selling.

An independent study by researchers at the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University shared data that indicated that Google’s AI Overview feature reduced organic clicks in SERPS by 38% when it showed up (have you seen your own organic traffic dropping?). Google’s own May 2026 guide says that optimising for its generative AI features is optimising for the search experience, so it is still SEO.

None of that means organic search is finished. Quite the opposite. Now more than ever, good all-round SEO is hugely important to a business, from building trust and authority to shaping how the digital world sees you. All it really means is that more of the shortlist gets decided before anyone reaches your website. If AI can’t read your pages, describes you wrongly, or simply prefers a competitor, you lose sales that never show up as lost. They just never arrive (insert joke about public transport).

Yes, with caveats, which we’ll helpfully give you here.

We have spent our own money sourcing the best tools for the job. We track prompts at all levels of the journey and across services, categories and product feeds. These prompts reflect how your buyers actually ask questions across the major AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude & the rest.

For each one, we report how often you’re mentioned, where you appear in the answer, how you’re described (sentiment), which sources are cited, and how you compare with named competitors. For ecommerce brands, we track at product level which products ChatGPT recommends, and at what price.

We then connect that to your analytics, where AI referral traffic can be separated out, as well as monitor the impact of our work on direct and branded traffic.

We mentioned some caveats, so here you go:
– AI answers vary between runs and between users, so we report trends over weeks, not one-off results. One screenshot of ChatGPT is an anecdote. Hundreds of tracked prompts over eight weeks is data.
– Some AI-influenced visits arrive looking like direct or branded traffic. The AI referral figures in your analytics platforms are a minimum, not a full count, and the exact figure is an attribution nightmare we all share.

That said, if visibility and conversions are both climbing, it’s a fair sign you’re on the right track. It won’t settle every argument about attribution, but it settles the important one.

No. Most AI platforms find web pages through search before they answer, and Google’s AI Overviews lean heavily on pages that already rank. Weak SEO foundations show up in AI answers too, just with less ceremony.

Traditional search also still sends far more traffic. A research piece by SEMRush (a useful tool we use), published in July 2025, forecasted that AI search would not overtake traditional search until some point in 2028. So while AI search is growing at a rate of knots, there is still a way to go before it is the only place users interact organically. AI SEO is a layer on top of good SEO, not a replacement for it.

If someone suggests switching off your SEO to “go all-in on AI”, ask them where they think AI gets its information.

No, although big brands do start with an advantage. They’ve usually been written about more, and AI notices that.

The opening for everyone else is specificity. The more specific the question, the fewer businesses have a clear, well-supported answer to it. “Best walking boots” is a crowded field. “Best waterproof walking boots for wide feet under £150” is not. Specialist ecommerce brands and lead-generation businesses with real expertise in a niche can be better placed to own those answers than the big generalists.

The work is the same at any size. What changes is which prompts are worth fighting for first.

We do work with household names, but some of our favourite projects are with the challengers who’d quite like to become household names themselves.

The thorough answer is an AI SEO audit.

We start by checking how AI search currently describes your business, then use our cool toys to track current visibility across AI search.

We won’t cover all of our audit, but here’s a flavour:

On the content side, we look at clarity, coverage and architecture. On the technical side, we check crawler access, rendering, speed and structured data, including what AI can and can’t see in your raw HTML. We research your entity, which is how your business is described across the web, and assess the topical authority and trust signals that decide whether AI is willing to recommend you.

Everything ends up as a prioritised list of actions, ranked by likely commercial impact, so you know what to fix first and what can wait.

If you’d like a head start in the meantime, ask ChatGPT what your business does. It might be worth sitting down for.

A basic audit costs nothing with us, other than your time. A deep dive audit (which we often provide for clients’ internal SEO teams) requires significantly more time to create and comes with a one-off cost.

Our ongoing AI SEO work is based on a minimum of a day and a half per month and increases depending on the size of the challenge and work required.

The price can change depending on time, and time depends on things like:

Communication, reporting, and analysis time.
How much content needs writing or fixing.
The size of the site and the technical AI SEO work needed on it.
Digital PR and the work needed to influence your authority and trust.
The size of the prompt tracking and visibility tracking required.

Tracking 50 prompts and tracking 5,000 are different jobs, in roughly the same way that walking the dog and walking from Land’s End to John o’ Groats are different jobs. So we work out what you actually need and put the price in the proposal, with what’s included and what isn’t.