When customers ask AI, is your brand the answer?

When someone asks ChatGPT “what is the best ultralight backpack?”, the answer usually names three to five brands and, depending on the engine, links a handful of sources. Your AI search visibility is how often you are one of those brands or sources, across the questions that matter to your business.

It is measured differently from classic SEO. There is no page two: you are in the answer or you are not. And the answer is written, so position means the order in which brands are listed, and a mention without a link still shapes what the reader buys.

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of getting your brand named and cited in answers written by AI. You will also see it called AI search engine optimization, LLM SEO or ChatGPT SEO; the names differ, the principle is the same.

It is not a separate discipline from SEO. The engines read the web before they answer, so GEO rests on the same foundations: useful pages, a site that can be crawled, and a brand other sites talk about. What changes is the target: instead of a position on a results page, you aim to be one of the few brands an answer names.

Assistants answer from two things: what their model learned in training, and what they retrieve from the web at the moment of the question. Perplexity, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews search the web for most questions; ChatGPT and Gemini do it for many. When they search, they read pages that rank well for related queries, then summarise them.

Google AI Overviews are built from pages in Google’s own index, and the links shown with the answer are the pages that support it. That is why they so often overlap with the top organic results for the query and for closely related searches.

That has a practical consequence. The brands that get named are usually the ones that appear, repeatedly and consistently, on the pages the engines read: review sites, buying guides, forums, comparison articles, and the brand’s own well-structured pages.

What tends to help

• Pages that answer a buyer’s question directly, with clear headings and specific facts.
• Mentions of your brand on independent sites that already rank for your topic.
• The same brand name, product names and key facts everywhere they appear.
• A site search engines can crawl easily: fast, indexable, without broken pages.

The quick test is simple: open a private window, ask ChatGPT the questions your customers ask, and note whether your brand appears. It is a useful first look, but it has limits.

• Answers vary between runs, so one answer is a sample, not a measurement.
• Logged-in chats can be influenced by your own history and memory.
• Five engines times dozens of prompts is hundreds of answers to read and compare.
• Without saving answers, you cannot tell next month whether anything changed.

A reliable check asks a fixed set of prompts on every engine, on a schedule, and reports rates rather than single answers. That is what an AI visibility tracker is for.

Mention rate

The share of answers that name your brand. It is the headline number, best read per engine, because each engine favours different sources.

Position in the answer

When an answer lists several brands, the first one gets the most attention. Your average position tells you whether you are the recommendation or the afterthought.

Citation rate

The share of answers that link to your site as a source. Citations send visitors and show which of your pages the engines trust.

Share of voice

Your mentions compared with your competitors’ across all prompts. It turns “we were mentioned 40 times” into “we are named in a quarter of the recommendations in our market”.

There is no switch that makes an assistant recommend you. The work is close to good SEO, aimed at the pages AI reads.

1. 1List the 20–50 questions buyers ask before choosing in your category, in their words. Start from the keywords you already rank for; keyword research shows the questions around them.
2. 2Check which domains the engines cite for those questions. Those sites are your targets for reviews, guest articles and product listings.
3. 3Make sure your own pages answer the same questions plainly: a clear summary, specifics, comparisons, and an FAQ built from real questions. AI Writer can draft these from the live Google top 10.
4. 4Fix what stops pages from being read: broken links, noindex tags, slow pages. A site audit finds them.
5. 5Keep your brand facts consistent across your site, your Google Business Profile and directories.
6. 6Measure again after each change and give it a few weeks: answers shift as engines re-read the web.

Aseoma asks your prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews, in your project’s country and language, weekly, monthly or on demand. Every answer is saved in full with its sources, your brand is detected under all its names, and each run is compared with the one before.

You get the mention rate, citation rate and average position per engine, your share of voice against your competitors, the brands the engines recommend most, and the sites they cite most. When your mentions drop past a threshold you set, an alert goes to e-mail, Slack, Telegram or a webhook.

Because it lives next to your rank tracker and Search Console data, you see AI answers and Google positions for the same topics side by side. Plans include 25 to 300 prompts; see pricing.