A few years ago, "are we on page one of Google?" was the only visibility question that mattered. Increasingly, it isn't the only one. More buying decisions now start with a question typed into ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, or Perplexity — "who supplies X in the UK?", "best dentist near me for Y?" — and those tools don't return ten blue links. They give one answer, and name a handful of sources. If your business isn't one of them, you're invisible at the exact moment a customer is deciding, even if you rank perfectly well in traditional search.
This is often called Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) or Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO). Neither is a mysterious new discipline — it's a specific, checkable set of technical signals that determine whether an AI system can understand your business confidently enough to name it.
Why traditional SEO isn't enough on its own
Traditional SEO optimises for a ranking algorithm that reads a page and a link graph. AI systems work differently: they try to build a confident, factual understanding of who you are and what you do, then decide whether they trust that understanding enough to repeat it as an answer. A page can rank well and still be useless to an AI system if the underlying facts about the business are inconsistent, buried in prose, or missing structured markup entirely.
The signals that actually matter
1. Structured data and schema
Organisation, Service, FAQ and Article schema (JSON-LD) give search and AI engines a machine-readable summary of exactly what you do and who you are — rather than making them infer it from paragraphs of marketing copy. This is one of the highest-leverage, lowest-effort fixes available, and most small business sites have none of it.
2. Entity consistency
The same factual statements, repeated consistently across your site — "official UK distributor of X", "founded in [year]", "based in [location]" — is the signal that makes an AI system confident enough to name you. Inconsistent or contradictory claims across different pages actively erode that confidence.
3. Content built for extraction
AI systems tend to lift short, clear, quotable, factual statements — not clever marketing copy. A paragraph that directly answers a specific question ("Do you ship to Northern Ireland? Yes, within 3 working days.") is far more likely to be quoted than a paragraph that talks around the answer.
4. FAQ and answer content
Real questions your customers actually ask, answered concisely, marked up with FAQ structured data. This does double duty: it's eligible for rich results in traditional search, and it's exactly the format AI systems are built to extract from.
5. Crawler access
AI crawlers need to be able to reach your content in the first place. Some businesses accidentally block them through overly aggressive robots.txt rules or bot-blocking services. It's worth checking that legitimate AI crawlers aren't being turned away by mistake.
How to check where you currently stand
Ask ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, or Perplexity a question a genuine customer might ask about your industry, without naming your business. If you're not mentioned, or a competitor is named instead with weaker credentials, that's your starting point — not a reason to panic, but a concrete gap to close.
This is one of five pillars, not the whole picture
AI readiness matters, but it doesn't operate in isolation — a site with perfect schema markup and no HTTPS, or blazing-fast pages that fail basic accessibility checks, still has real problems. That's why AI readiness is one of five pillars in the free Website Intelligence Assessment, alongside technical SEO, performance, accessibility and security. I'll review where your site actually stands across all five, by hand, and send you a plain-English report within 24 hours. If AI visibility specifically turns out to be the priority, that's exactly what AI Search Optimisation is built to fix.