AI search optimisation is the work of making a business easy for AI-generated answers to find, understand and cite. That means Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, and assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, which people now ask for advice, comparisons and recommendations before they ever visit a website. I do this work for UK businesses from London.
A common starting point: someone asks an AI tool to recommend a firm in your field and a competitor is named instead of you, or a Google search that used to bring enquiries now opens with an AI summary and fewer people click through. This page covers what can realistically be done, what can be measured, and which of my three AI search services fits.
What AI search optimisation means in practice
AI tools write an answer and point to some of the pages they drew on. Google’s AI Overviews are built from pages already in Google’s index. ChatGPT, Perplexity and the other assistants answer partly from what their model learned in training and, more and more, from web searches run as the question is asked. Either way, the raw material is ordinary web pages plus what other sites, directories and reviews say about you.
So most of the work overlaps with good SEO. A page Google cannot crawl will not be cited in an AI Overview, and a business barely described anywhere online gives an assistant little to go on. What changes is where the effort goes:
- Answers that can be lifted. AI tools quote passages, not whole pages, so a page that gives its answer plainly near the top and then backs it up is easier to use than one that builds up to the point.
- Consistent facts about the business. Your trading name, what you do, where you work and who you serve should match on your website, your Google Business Profile, your Companies House record and the directories you appear in. Conflicting details make it harder for any system to be sure who you are.
- What other people write about you. Recommendations in AI answers tend to draw on independent sources: comparison articles, review platforms, trade press and professional bodies. Your own site is only part of the picture.
- Access for the right crawlers. Some AI tools fetch pages with their own crawlers, such as OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot, and a robots.txt rule or a hosting firewall setting can shut them out without anyone noticing.
None of this is a trick; the same qualities make a page useful to the person reading it. My guide to how AI answers choose the websites they cite explains the mechanics in more depth.
Who this work is for
It suits UK businesses whose customers research before they buy and are likely to ask an AI tool at some point along the way: B2B firms and software companies with long sales cycles, accountants, solicitors and other professional practices, private clinics, and online shops selling products people compare. Signs that it is worth looking at:
- Search Console shows impressions holding steady on important searches while clicks fall, and those searches now open with an AI Overview.
- New enquiries mention finding you, or a competitor, through ChatGPT or Perplexity.
- An AI tool describes your business wrongly: an old address, a service you no longer offer, prices from several years ago.
- When you ask an assistant for recommendations in your field, competitors are named and you are not.
It is the wrong place to start if the website has basic problems, such as important pages missing from Google, thin service pages or no clear page for what you sell. AI tools rely on the same foundations, so technical SEO fixes or a full audit will do more for the same budget. And if most of your work comes from people nearby searching for a trade or a shop, the map results and your Google Business Profile deserve your attention before AI answers do.
Choosing between the three AI search services
I split the work three ways because the problems differ, and so do the fixes. Many businesses need only one. If you are unsure, start from what you are seeing.
| What you are seeing | Where I would start | What that work concentrates on |
|---|---|---|
| Your important Google searches now show an AI Overview, and clicks from them have dropped | Google AI Overviews optimisation | Becoming one of the sources Google links to in AI Overviews and AI Mode, which depends on your pages being indexed, ranking and answering the question well. |
| Buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Claude for recommendations, and your business is left out or described badly | Generative engine optimisation (GEO) | How assistants find, retrieve and describe your brand, including the third-party sources they rely on when they name businesses. |
| Your customers search in questions: how to, how much, which is better, what is the difference | Answer engine optimisation (AEO) | Structuring pages so one clear answer can be lifted into a featured snippet, a voice answer or an AI response. |
The three overlap, and a longer engagement often covers more than one. Separating them puts the budget where your problem sits, not into three projects where one would do.
What can be measured today, and what cannot
AI search is harder to measure than ordinary search, and any report on it should say which figures are counted and which are estimated.
What I can measure
- Visits from AI assistants. When someone clicks a cited link in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini, GA4 usually records a referral from that tool, so those visits and the enquiries they produce can be reported. Some arrive with no referrer and count as direct, so treat the figure as a minimum.
- Whether you are cited for an agreed set of questions. For the searches and prompts we choose together, I record who is cited and how you are described, on a fixed schedule, so each round compares like for like.
- Whether AI crawlers can reach the site. Robots.txt, firewall settings and, where your host provides them, server logs show which crawlers get in.
- Search Console trends. Clicks, impressions and click-through rate on the searches that matter, read alongside whether each one currently shows an AI Overview.
What cannot be measured reliably yet
- How often an assistant mentions you across all its users. Most assistants offer businesses nothing like Search Console, and answers shift with the wording, the user’s history and location, and the day.
- AI Overview traffic on its own. At the time of writing, Search Console counts clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode inside its normal web search totals, with no separate filter, so their share has to be inferred.
- The value of a mention without a click. Someone may read your name in an answer and search for you a week later. That shows up, if at all, as more searches for your business name, and cannot be traced to one answer.
- Why a particular source was chosen. These systems do not explain their selections, so any claim to know exactly why one page beat another is an informed guess.
My reports mix counted figures with dated samples and label which is which.
How the work runs
- Agree the questions. We list the searches and prompts your buyers are likely to use, in their own words: who to hire, what it costs, which option suits them. Everything is measured against this fixed set.
- Record a baseline. I run that set through Google, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, and through assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. For each answer I note who is cited, whether you appear and what is said about you, with the date.
- Check the foundations. Crawl access for Google and the AI crawlers, indexing, the structure of your key pages, the structured data on them, and whether your business details match across your site, your Business Profile and the main UK directories.
- Fix and improve. Rewriting key pages so they answer first and support the answer with evidence, adding pages for questions where competitors are cited and you have nothing to offer, and correcting wrong information where it originates. I make the changes myself or write them up for your developer or writers.
- Measure again. The same set of questions is re-run on a regular schedule and reported alongside GA4 referrals and Search Console data, so you can see what has moved and decide whether to continue.
Where I stand on the current claims
AI search attracts a lot of confident selling. My view of the claims you are most likely to hear:
- Guaranteed placement in ChatGPT or AI Overviews. Nobody outside OpenAI or Google controls what those systems say, so nobody can promise it. I will not, and I would treat such a promise as a reason to look elsewhere.
- A special file that makes AI tools cite you. llms.txt is a proposed file for guiding AI tools around a site. None of the major AI search tools has confirmed it relies on one, and Google’s search team has said Search does not use it. Adding one costs little, but it is not a strategy.
- Schema markup as the key to AI search. Structured data helps machines read facts such as your address, prices and opening hours, and it is worth having. Google’s own guidance on AI features and your website says no special markup or extra steps are needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
- SEO is finished. AI Overviews are assembled from pages Google indexes, and assistants that search the web read ordinary pages, often ones that already rank well. Weak SEO and weak AI visibility tend to go together because both rest on the same pages.
- Publish hundreds of AI-written answers. Pages produced in bulk mainly to catch searches can breach Google’s spam policy on scaled content, and seldom contain anything worth citing.
What AI search work costs
I price this work by the job once I have looked at your site and your market, and you receive a written quote in pounds before anything starts. The main things that move the cost:
- how many questions, services and locations need tracking;
- how much SEO groundwork is needed first, since crawling problems and thin pages come before anything AI-specific;
- whether I write the new and revised content or brief your own writers;
- whether you want a one-off review and plan, or monitoring and improvement over several months.
If your site needs basic SEO work, I will say so and suggest spending there first. Monitoring AI answers for a site Google struggles to index buys a record of the problem, not a fix.
Next step
If AI answers are leaving your business out, naming competitors instead or getting your details wrong, send me your website and the questions your customers ask. Two or three in their words are enough, and they let our first conversation start from how Google and the main assistants actually answer them today.