Resolve
Answer
Corroborate
Mostly a rebrand, and we'd rather say that than sell you a separate package for it.
AI models find businesses using the same web, the same crawlers, and largely the same signals search always used. There is no separate discipline. GEO, AEO, and AI SEO are new names for SEO done thoroughly, which is why the deliverables in most AI packages are schema markup and a checklist that were always part of doing the job properly.
What genuinely changed is the tolerance. Search let you be roughly right and still land somewhere on page one. An answer names a few businesses and everyone else is invisible. The bar didn't move. The margin for error disappeared.
Three things, and any agency that can't say them in a sentence or two doesn't know.
First, can a machine identify you with confidence. Consistent name and details everywhere, pages that state plainly what you do and who for, structured data that isn't guessing. Most sites fail here and never find out.
Second, is there anything worth quoting. Models excerpt the sentence that answers the question. Most content is written the other way around, building to a point the reader has to earn.
Third, has anyone outside your company confirmed it. A model won't stake an answer on a business nobody else has vouched for. This is the one that decides most outcomes and the one that gets skipped most, because it's slow and there's nothing to bill for on a Tuesday.
No, and anyone who does is guessing.
Retrieval isn't deterministic. The same question asked twice can produce different answers, and results shift as AI models get retrained. No agency controls what a system surfaces.
Citations move. One that exists this month may not next month, because these systems are still being tuned and retrained constantly. That's not a failure of the work, it's the nature of what's being measured.
If someone promises you a citation, ask what happens when it disappears.
Usually, almost certainly not, and the feeling that you are is being sold to you.
Most businesses have done none of this, including large ones. Most agencies selling AI visibility can't explain what produces it. The market is not as far along as the marketing about the market suggests.
The real risk isn't being behind. It's that feeling behind makes people wait until they understand it better, and waiting is the one thing that guarantees you stay where you are. Two years of waiting isn't neutral. It's two years of someone else being the answer and their online authority compounding.
No, though a lot of the category sells it that way because it's the easiest part to package.
Schema helps a system parse your business. It doesn't make anything trust you. A perfectly marked-up site with nothing substantial behind it stays invisible, and that's by design. These systems are built to identify genuine expertise and filter out everything constructed to imitate it.
The same applies to llms.txt and the other new files. We implement them, they're cheap to add, and the evidence for their impact is thin. Anyone presenting them as the answer is selling certainty that doesn't exist yet.
It mostly isn't, and that's the honest answer.
The difference is emphasis. Traditional SEO could succeed on strong content and technical work alone. AI recommendation weights corroboration more heavily, because a model naming one business is making a riskier claim than a search engine listing ten. It wants outside confirmation before it commits.
So the work shifts toward entity clarity and third-party references, and away from volume. Almost nobody is doing all three. If you are, you don't need us, and we'll say so on the call.
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