SEO optimizes your website to rank higher in Google search results. AEO optimizes your entire digital identity — your website, structured data, directory listings, reviews, and third-party mentions — so AI platforms recognize your business, trust the information they find about it, and include it when recommending businesses to users. SEO drives website traffic through clicks. AEO drives leads through direct AI recommendations — customers may call you without ever visiting your website.

AI platforms evaluate several factors: clear entity definition — the AI must understand exactly what your business does, where it operates, and who runs it. Structured data — schema markup that tells AI systems how to categorize your business in machine-readable format. Third-party validation — mentions on directories, review platforms, and industry publications carry more weight than your own website. Information consistency — the same business name, address, services, and details everywhere. And content authority — factual, question-and-answer content written in the neutral tone AI platforms prefer to cite.

The audit evaluates your business across 7 pillars: AI entity and site alignment, AI-optimized content framework, structured data and schema implementation, trusted off-site citation alignment, neutral authority positioning, messaging and tone correction, and AI visibility baseline validation. Each pillar is scored on a 1 to 10 scale. You receive a detailed findings report with specific evidence for each pillar and a prioritized action tracker organizing every recommended fix by urgency — immediate, short-term, and medium-term.

We optimize for and track your visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overview. These are the primary platforms potential customers use when asking for business recommendations. The foundational optimization work — entity clarity, structured data, consistent information, and third-party citations — benefits all AI platforms simultaneously.

Entity optimization ensures AI systems clearly understand what your business is, what it does, where it operates, and who leads it. This includes creating definitive factual statements about your business on your website, implementing Organization, LocalBusiness, and Person schema markup, ensuring your business name, address, phone number, and service descriptions are identical across every platform where you appear, and connecting your founder's credentials and authority to the business entity.

Structured data is code added to your website that tells AI platforms how to interpret your business information in machine-readable format. Without it, AI systems have to guess what your business does based on unstructured text — and they often guess wrong or skip your business entirely. We implement Organization, LocalBusiness, Person, Service, FAQ, and Article schema markup so AI platforms can accurately identify, categorize, and recommend your business.

Off-site citations are mentions of your business on third-party websites — directories, review platforms, industry publications, and authoritative databases. AI platforms trust what independent sources say about your business more than what your own website says. A business with listings on Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, Clutch, BBB, and industry directories supported by Google Reviews gives AI platforms the validation they need to recommend it with confidence.

We track 25 to 100 AI prompts depending on your tier across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overview. These are the specific questions your potential customers ask — branded queries about your business by name, competitive queries asking which businesses are best in your category, and geographic queries asking for recommendations in your service area. We run these prompts at regular intervals and measure how often your business is mentioned, how accurately it is described, and how your mention rate compares to competitors.

Timeline depends on your starting position. Structured data changes and directory listings can influence AI responses within weeks. Content optimization and citation building typically produce measurable AI mention rate increases within 30 to 90 days. Businesses starting with zero off-site presence take longer than those with an existing foundation. The key accelerators are schema markup implementation, Google Business Profile optimization, and building a consistent citation network across at least 10 authoritative sources.

Yes. A business can rank first on Google for a keyword and still be completely absent from AI recommendations. Google rankings and AI recommendations use different evaluation criteria. AI platforms weight entity clarity, structured data, third-party validation, and information consistency more heavily than traditional ranking signals like backlinks. If your competitors are being recommended by AI and you are not, you are losing customers who never see your website because they acted on the AI recommendation directly.

Yes. The AI Visibility Foundation Audit includes a baseline test where we run branded, competitive, and geographic queries across all major AI platforms and document exactly what they say — whether your business is mentioned, whether the information is accurate, and which competitors are recommended instead. This gives you a clear picture of where you stand before any optimization begins.