AI Search Isn't Just SEO With a New Name
Traditional SEO is largely about getting your website to appear when somebody searches Google. AI search changes the question.
Somebody might ask “who are the best concrete pumping companies around the Gold Coast?”, or “what's a good hotel to stay at in Byron Bay?”, or “who should I use for SEO if I'm a small business in Northern NSW?”
The answer may name a handful of businesses rather than returning a list of ten blue links.
A lot of the underlying work is still ordinary local SEO. But AI systems can also look beyond your own website at the other evidence they can find about your business. That is the part I work on here.
The Work Behind AI Visibility
Most of this overlaps with good SEO.
- Make sure AI can reach your site: checking that the crawlers these services use, GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot among them, can actually fetch your pages. A security plugin or a server setting can block them without anybody realising, and it is one of the first things an SEO audit looks for
- Make your business information consistent: your name, location, phone number, services and opening hours making sense wherever they are mentioned
- Write pages that are easy to understand: what you do, who it's for, where you operate and what makes you different, answered clearly and early rather than three paragraphs down
- Build evidence away from your own website: the industry sites, directories, publications and review sites where your business should be represented
- Add structured information: schema and other structured data, so a machine can read what your business is, where it operates and what it offers. Useful groundwork, not a magic AI ranking button
- Track what AI actually says: a baseline across ChatGPT, Google and Perplexity, then the same questions asked again later
The bit most people miss
AI Doesn't Only Look at Your Website
Ask an AI who's a good plumber in Byron Bay and it can find your website. It can also find your Google Business Profile, your directory listings, your reviews, industry websites and local publications. Those two groups of sources do two different jobs.
Other Sites Establish Who You Are
Each of them tells part of the story. If they all describe you as a plumber in Byron Bay, the picture is consistent.
If one says you're a plumber, another says you're a builder, another has an old phone number and another has a completely different address, the picture is much less clear.
Getting those sources to agree with each other is a large part of the work.
Your Own Site Explains What You Are
Once a system decides your business is worth mentioning, it still has to work out how to describe you, and that is mostly your own website's job.
A page that says you provide concrete pumping across the Gold Coast and Northern Rivers for residential and commercial projects leaves very little ambiguity.
A page that spends 600 words on a commitment to excellence before mentioning what you actually do leaves a great deal more work to be done. I build small business websites so the important facts sit near the top of the page, which is good for AI and good for people.
Before and after
Measuring What AI Says About You
We agree the questions
The things a potential customer might actually ask. Who are the best wedding venues around Byron Bay, who does SEO for tradies in Northern NSW, where can I hire equipment around Ballina.
I record a baseline
What comes back today. Who gets mentioned, who gets cited, which sources are being used, and how your business is described when it appears.
The work goes on
Access, consistency, the pages themselves, and the evidence available about you elsewhere.
We check again
The same questions asked the same way, so any change is visible. Nobody can promise an AI will say a particular thing, but whether your visibility is improving is something we can measure.
Terminology
AI Overviews, GEO and Other Names for the Same Work
The vocabulary is still settling down. I'm less interested in what we call it than in whether your business gets found, and described accurately, when people use AI to make a decision.
| Google AI Overviews | generated from Google's own search systems, so the ordinary search work still matters. There is no special piece of markup that makes a business appear in one |
|---|---|
| GEO | generative engine optimisation, the same discipline under a longer name |
| AI SEO, AI search optimisation | the same again. What matters underneath is whether an AI system can understand your business and describe it accurately |
AI Search for Byron Bay Businesses, and Further Afield
I work from Byron Bay, and your customers can be anywhere at all. You might run a local service business, an ecommerce store, a hotel, a medical practice, a construction company, or a business selling nationally.
What matters is where your customers search, and what you want AI systems to understand about your business.
See all servicesQuestions
AI Search FAQs
What people ask about ChatGPT, AI Overviews and the rest of it.
How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?
There's no guaranteed way to make ChatGPT mention a business. The work is about making yours easier for AI systems to understand and verify: your own website, your business information, third party mentions, reviews and structured data all form part of that picture.
Is AI SEO different from normal SEO?
Partly. A lot of the underlying work is the same. The difference is that AI search puts more weight on the information available outside your own website, alongside how clearly your own pages explain the business.
Why does ChatGPT mention my competitor but not me?
There can be several reasons, but a common one is that the competitor has a stronger or more consistent presence across the sources the system is using. I'll look at what the AI is actually citing rather than guessing at it.
Do I need an llms.txt file?
Probably not something I'd spend much money on. There is currently no evidence that an llms.txt file is a shortcut into AI answers. I'd rather put the budget towards things that give your business more useful evidence across the web.
Will AI search replace Google?
Probably not. But people are already using AI tools alongside ordinary search, and the way they ask questions is different. If somebody asks an AI who they should use, being one of the businesses it recommends is another way of being found.
How long does AI SEO take?
Some technical problems can be fixed immediately. Building a stronger presence across your website and other sources takes longer, particularly where you need new content, mentions or links. That's why I benchmark your visibility first and track it over time.