Services

AI search visibility

Your brand isn't ranking. It's not even being cited.

AI search has rewritten the rules. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude aren't just answering questions; they're deciding who gets recommended. We make sure that's you. We make digital make sense.

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Where we track you:

ChatGPT
Perplexity
Gemini
Claude
Google AI Overviews
Google Search

The plain-English version

What is AI search visibility?

AI search visibility is how often, and how accurately, AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews mention, cite, or recommend your brand when people ask questions in your space. It's the AI-era equivalent of a first-page ranking, except the answer engine picks one or two names instead of showing ten links.

Two terms cover the work of improving it, and people use them almost interchangeably:

AEO

Answer engine optimization

Structuring your content so answer engines can find it, extract it, and quote it: direct answers, clean headings, FAQ blocks, and structured data that machines parse without guessing.

GEO

Generative engine optimization

The broader discipline of shaping how generative AI describes and recommends your brand: your own content, plus the third-party reviews, publisher mentions, and community discussions AI engines treat as evidence.

How it differs from SEO: SEO gets you ranked. AEO gets you cited. Good SEO is still the foundation, since AI engines draw heavily on search indexes, but ranking alone no longer guarantees you're in the answer. A well-structured page can be cited even when it doesn't rank first.

Traditional SEO compared with AEO and GEO
	Traditional SEO	AEO / GEO
You win when	You rank on page one	The AI names you in its answer
Unit of competition	A page	A passage: one clear, liftable answer
Who's judging	Google's ranking systems	ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews
What earns trust	Links and authority	Sources, statistics, structure, third-party consensus
How you measure it	Rankings and organic traffic	Share of voice inside AI answers
When it compounds	Months of link building	Structure moves in weeks; citations build for the long term

Last updated October 2026

The problem

SEO alone won't save you

Search has changed. If your strategy was built for Google circa 2023, you're losing ground in the world of AI chatbots and answer engines.

Review and comparison sites took your rankings

A new layer of editorial sites now dominates search results, sitting between your brand and the audiences searching for you. They capture the click, shape opinion, and own the visibility you used to.

AI Overviews push you off the page

Even when you rank, the AI Overview appears above your result, and most people never scroll past it. Position #1 is less valuable than it's ever been.

Audiences are using AI, even within Google

People increasingly turn to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews to research products, services, organizations, and ideas. If you're not being cited in those answers, you don't exist.

You have no visibility into any of it

Traditional GA4 and Search Console data doesn't show you how AI engines are (or aren't) recommending you. You're flying blind.

What we do

Strategy and measurement. Authoritative content. Third-party citations. Technical foundations. Four pillars that together make you the brand AI engines recommend.

Strategy and content

AEO Strategy & AI Visibility Tracking
We define the strategic direction for your AI visibility program and track how it's performing. That means measuring how AI engines describe, cite, and recommend you across platforms, benchmarking against competitors, and analyzing what the data means and what to do about it.
Content Strategy & Creation
We produce the accurate, well-sourced, expert-backed content that AI engines recognize as reliable and cite back to users. That includes refreshing existing content with current thinking, adding authoritative references like studies and expert commentary, and building the topic depth that signals authority.

Authority and technical

Authority & Citation Building
AI builds its picture of your brand from everywhere you appear, not just your website. We secure the publisher placements, review-site presence, third-party citations, and Reddit visibility that LLMs treat as authoritative. The goal is consistent, credible signals everywhere AI looks.
Site & Technical AEO
We make your site and content extractable, understandable, and credible to AI. Clear heading hierarchies, FAQ and summary blocks, structured data and schema, entity and knowledge graph optimization, and the E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) AI engines reward. Many of these overlap with technical SEO, and we cover both.

The evidence

How AI engines decide who to recommend

This isn't guesswork. The selection patterns are studied, and they're consistent. Researchers from Princeton and IIT Delhi tested nine ways of rewriting web content across 10,000 queries, then confirmed the results on Perplexity. Their findings, presented at KDD 2024:

Up to 40%: more visibility in AI answers from adding quotations, statistics, and cited sources
Up to 37%: more visibility in live tests on Perplexity
Top 3: methods: quote experts, add statistics, cite sources
No lift: from keyword stuffing: the old SEO reflex

Source: Aggarwal et al., "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization," KDD 2024.

Structure gets extracted

AI engines lift passages, not pages. Content with clear direct answers, comparison tables, and FAQ blocks gets pulled into answers; content that buries its point in paragraph five doesn't.

Third parties carry more weight

AI engines lean on the sources they trust: review platforms, industry directories, publisher coverage, Wikipedia, Reddit. That's why citation building is half of this work, not an add-on.

Freshness matters

Dated, recently updated content beats undated content of the same quality. AI engines want to hand people current answers.

The path

How an engagement works

01
Audit
We run your brand through the queries that matter to your business across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, and audit your site's extractability: schema, structure, freshness, and the third-party sources AI already associates with you. You get the findings whether or not you go further.
02
Fix and build
Technical AEO first, because it's fast and it compounds: schema, FAQ blocks, direct answers, llms.txt. Then the slower, more durable work, content depth and third-party citations, in priority order from the audit.
03
Measure monthly
AI share of voice, brand attribute tracking, citation performance, and traditional SEO in one report. What happened, why, and what we're doing about it next month.

Reporting

Your own reporting portal

Every client gets a reporting portal we build for them: every channel in one place, updated daily, with notes from our team on what's working and what we're doing next.

Built around your goals, not a template
Social, paid, email, website, and AI search together
Plain-English notes from your account team
Open it anytime, on any device

Client portal · sample

Sample portal with sample data. Every client's portal is built around its own goals and channels.

Some of our AI search work

MtoM

We run this playbook on our own site

In August 2026 we audited mtomconsulting.com the way we'd audit a client, and then did the work. Structured data describing who we are and what we do, so engines don't have to guess. An llms.txt file that gives AI systems a clean, machine-readable map of the agency. FAQ blocks written the way real clients ask real questions, marked up so answer engines can lift them whole. Direct-answer definitions at the top of pages instead of buried in paragraph five. We track the results the same way we would for you: which queries surface us in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI answers, and how that changes month over month. It's easier to trust a mechanic who maintains their own car.

Schema
llms.txt
FAQ blocks
AI visibility tracking

RoadRunner Auto Transport

Authority and citations for a national car shipper

For RoadRunner Auto Transport, we build the third-party signals AI engines use to decide who to recommend: press releases built on its own shipping data, including a Rate Index drawn from more than 1.5 million shipments, placements with automotive publishers, review-platform work with the BBB and Consumer Affairs, a Reddit presence that answers real buyer questions, and YouTube creator partnerships.

GEO
Digital PR
Citation building
Reddit

WellNest Professional Cleaning

SEO, AEO, and GEO for a local service business

For WellNest, a home cleaning company, we run SEO, AEO, and GEO alongside its Google Ads, Meta ads, email, and website, so the same work that brings in searchers also shapes how AI tools describe the business.

Works with

Social Media Content Creation Influencer Marketing Digital Advertising Web Development

Industries

Associations Museums and attractionsNonprofitsHotelsRestaurants and foodRetail centersHigher educationConsumer productsCommunity organizationsLaw and professional servicesHealthcare and wellnessHome building and services

Where we work

We work with clients all across the United States. Our home base is Falls Church, Virginia, and we serve the DC region in person:

All of the United StatesArlington Northern Virginia Washington, DC

FAQ

Is AEO a replacement for SEO?

No. It's built on top of it. AI engines draw on search indexes, so a site that's invisible to Google is invisible to them too. The mistake is stopping at SEO: ranking gets you onto the list AI engines read, and AEO is what gets you into the answer they write.

How do you measure what an AI says about us?

We build a panel of the queries that matter to your business and run them on a schedule across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, logging whether you're cited, who is, how you're described, and how that shifts month to month. It's the same discipline as rank tracking, applied to answers instead of positions.

How long until we see results?

The technical layer moves first: schema, structure, and direct answers get picked up as engines recrawl, often within weeks. Citations and third-party authority build over months, and they're what make the results durable. We report monthly from day one, so you see the movement as it happens rather than waiting for a big reveal.

Will optimizing for AI hurt our regular Google rankings?

No. Nearly everything AI engines reward (clear structure, direct answers, cited sources, real expertise) is what Google's own quality guidelines have asked for all along. Done right, the same work improves both. What doesn't help is the old-school shortcut: in the research, keyword stuffing did little or nothing for AI visibility.

We're a small organization. Is there a version of this we can afford?

Yes. Every engagement starts with the audit, and for some clients the audit plus a one-time technical fix is the whole project. Retainers are for brands competing in categories where AI answers are already steering buyers.

Do you actually do this on your own site?

We do: schema, llms.txt, extractable answers, and monthly AI visibility tracking on mtomconsulting.com. Ask on the discovery call and we'll walk you through the implementation itself, not a slide about it.

Do you only work with clients in the DC area?

No. We're based in Falls Church, but we run AI search visibility programs for clients across the United States.

Most brands have never once checked.Find out what AI says about your brand.

The audit is free, the findings are yours either way, and the ones who look first tend to stay ahead.

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