What is AI SEO? A plain guide to AI search optimization

AI SEO is the work of getting your brand named and recommended by Google’s AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and ChatGPT, although the term can also mean using AI tools to do SEO. This guide is about the first meaning. When a buyer asks AI for the best option, AI SEO is how your brand ends up in the answer. In our 10,000-keyword study, Google showed an AI Overview for 8,658 of 10,000 buying searches, so that answer is often the first thing a buyer reads.

What AI SEO means (and what it doesn’t)

AI SEO means making your brand easy for AI to find, trust and name. The goal is simple. When someone asks AI a question your business can answer, your brand is in the reply, and the reply describes you correctly.

This guide covers three places where that happens:

• Google’s AI Overviews, the AI answer at the top of many Google results.
• Google AI Mode, a chat-style search inside Google.
• ChatGPT, which answers questions in a chat and can search the web.

Here is what AI SEO doesn’t mean:

• It isn’t using AI to write your posts. Tools that write drafts or suggest keywords are “AI for SEO.” They can save time, but they don’t get your brand named in AI answers on their own.
• It isn’t a trick or a hidden code. No tag on your site makes AI recommend you.
• It isn’t only about your website. Much of what AI says about you comes from other websites.

AI search optimization: the same work, another name

AI search optimization is another name for AI SEO. Both phrases mean the same work: helping AI search tools find, trust and name your brand.

The field is new, so it has many names. You will see:

• GEO, or generative engine optimization. “Generative” means the AI writes a new answer. Our guide on what is GEO explains the term in full.
• AEO, or answer engine optimization. It started with answer boxes and voice search, and now covers AI answers too.
• LLM SEO, also called LLMO. LLM stands for large language model, the kind of AI that writes answers.
• AI visibility, which is the result you want: how often AI names your brand, and what it says. We explain it in what is AI visibility.

Each name puts the focus in a slightly different place, but the day-to-day work is the same.

How AI SEO works on Google’s AI and ChatGPT

AI SEO works by getting your brand onto the pages AI reads and trusts, because AI builds its answers from those pages. When someone asks a question, the AI looks at web pages, pulls out what they say and writes a short answer. It often names brands and links to some of the pages it used.

Google’s AI and ChatGPT do this in different ways:

• Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode lean on Google search. They tend to use pages that already rank in Google for the same question.
• ChatGPT leans on what it already knows, plus its own web search. It learned from a huge amount of text, so it already knows many brands. In our study, 82.22% of ChatGPT answers named at least one brand that an AI model with no web search also named for the same question.

The two rarely use the same pages. Google’s AI Overviews linked 4.94 pages per keyword on average, and ChatGPT linked 2.35. On the 6,482 keywords where both had links, they shared only 3.33% of their linked pages on average.

They also lean on different kinds of sites. YouTube was linked in 50.81% of AI Overviews and Reddit in 49.87%. In ChatGPT, each showed up in less than 1% of answers.

Answers change, too. We ran the same 1,000 keywords in Google three times. The linked pages overlapped 90.96% on average, but the brands named overlapped only 60.06%. So one check tells you very little.

This means AI SEO has to cover Google’s AI and ChatGPT as two jobs. Work that helps you in one may do little in the other.

AI SEO vs SEO

SEO gets your pages to rank in Google’s list of results. AI SEO gets your brand named in the answer AI writes. The two overlap a lot, but they are not the same.

For Google, ranking still matters a lot. In our study, 49.83% of the pages linked in AI Overviews were also in Google’s top 10 for the same keyword. For ChatGPT, it was only 10.87%.

Here is what AI SEO adds on top of SEO:

• Other websites speak for you. AI often trusts what others say about you more than what you say about yourself.
• A name can count without a link. When ChatGPT named brands it already knew, 85% of those mentions had no link to the brand’s own website. The buyer still heard the name.
• Clicks don’t show the whole picture. You need to know whether AI names you, not just whether people visit.

So good SEO is still the base of AI SEO, mostly for Google. AI SEO adds the work that SEO leaves out.

AI SEO strategy: where to start

A good AI SEO strategy is one plan, not a list of tricks. It gets your brand onto the pages AI trusts and the pages that rank, and then keeps checking the answers. Start with these five steps:

1. List your buyers’ questions. Write down what people ask before they buy what you sell, like “best dentist for kids near me” or “best running shoes for flat feet.”
2. See where you stand. Ask Google and ChatGPT those questions. Note whether your brand is named, what is said about it, which competitors are named and which pages are linked.
3. Rank for those questions. Make your own pages answer each question clearly, with plain facts about what you do, who it’s for and where you work.
4. Get named on the pages AI trusts. Find the review sites, “best of” lists, comparison pages, forums and videos that come up for your questions, and work to get your brand named on them with correct facts.
5. Keep checking. Answers change, so check again and again. Track whether AI names you, not just your clicks.

Step 4 is where most brands fall short. In our study, 80.69% of the links next to brand mentions in AI Overviews went to other websites, not the brand’s own site.

Don’t try to take a shortcut with cheap guest posts. Only 2% of the sites AI Overviews linked in our study were in a catalog of sites that sell them.

Also know what AI SEO can’t do. No one can promise that AI will name you, because AI picks its own answers and they change. What you can do is make your brand easier to find and trust in more of the places AI looks.

Get your free AI visibility audit

AI SEO is how your brand gets named when buyers ask AI. If you want help with it, our AI SEO agency gets your brand onto the pages AI trusts and the pages that rank, and we obsessively track the answers on Google’s AI and ChatGPT. To see where you stand first, get a free AI visibility audit. It shows whether AI names you or your competitors, what your buyers ask, and how to close the gap.