AI search optimization services, measured one platform at a time.
Every agency added this to the menu in the last eighteen months. Far fewer added the instrumentation, which is why most AI search reporting is a single number with no way to check it. Below is what the work actually involves, a real citation breakdown from a client engagement, and exactly what gets reported to you each month.
AI search doesn't rank ten blue links. It writes an answer, then hands the reader a small list of sources. That list is the new page one.
Being the source the answer cites.
We optimize for the citation, not for a rank position that no longer exists in the same form. Below is how the citations actually distribute across platforms, from tracking rather than estimation.
The platform split nobody shows you.
Da Vinci sells warehouse software to third-party logistics firms. After eleven months of work, their content held 74 citations across AI platforms. Here is how those 74 were distributed, pulled from tracking rather than estimated.
| Platform | Citations |
|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | 37 |
| Google AI Mode | 21 |
| ChatGPT | 9 |
| Perplexity | 3 |
| Microsoft Copilot | 3 |
| Gemini | 1 |
| Total | 74 |
Look at the shape of that. Google's two surfaces account for 58 of 74, nearly four out of five. ChatGPT, the platform every board asks about first, delivered 9. Perplexity and Copilot delivered three each.
Two things follow. First, a blended AI visibility score would have hidden all of this, and any agency reporting one is either not measuring per platform or would rather you did not look. Second, the platforms behave differently enough that the work differs: what earns a Google AI Overview citation is not identical to what earns a ChatGPT mention, and you cannot optimize for the gap you cannot see.
Your distribution will not match Da Vinci's. That is the point of measuring it.
What AI search optimization services cover.
Five workstreams. The first two are diagnostic and happen before anything is changed.
Crawler access audit
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and their peers each need an explicit allow or block decision. Most sites have never made one, they inherited whatever their CDN or platform shipped by default, and blocked crawlers cannot cite you. Cheapest item on this page to correct, and the one we find unattended most often.
Citation baseline
Your current position, one platform at a time, against the questions real buyers put to assistants. Skip this step and no future claim about improvement can be tested, ours included.
Entity and structured data work
Systems answering “what is this product” reconcile you across your own site, your review profiles, your LinkedIn, and everywhere else you appear. Contradictions lower confidence and cost citations. One Organization schema, one canonical description, consistent naming everywhere, and the sameAs links that connect them.
Citable-claim retrofits
The research is unambiguous about what gets quoted. The peer-reviewed work on generative engines put the lift at 30 to 40 percent for sources carrying citations, quotations, and statistics. So key pages get restructured around specific, sourced, extractable claims, with direct answers placed where a system can lift them cleanly.the peer-reviewed work
Third-party presence
Assistants triangulate. A vendor that exists only on its own domain reads as unverified, so this covers the review platforms, comparison articles, and community threads that AI answers about software vendors draw from most heavily.
Diagnosis first, work second.
Citable-claim retrofits and third-party presence work draw from the same content and authority machinery as the rest of the program. See how we handle content for the two-reader problem for the writing side of it.
What gets reported, every month.
Four things, all verifiable without asking us.
Citations per platform
The table above, for you, updated monthly. Never blended.
Share of answer
Each platform gets the same question set, and we log which vendors come back named. This is the AI equivalent of rank tracking, and you can reproduce any row of it in about two minutes.
AI Overview presence on money terms
Tracked separately from rankings, because an Overview sitting above position one changes what position one is worth.
AI referral traffic and conversion
The absolute numbers stay small on most sites for now. Watch the slope, not the total.
That combination is what an ai visibility agency should be handing over, and it is the practical difference between selling ai seo services and measuring them.
The pricing page covers what this costs as a workstream. It runs inside a program rather than as a standalone product, because citations come from the same authority and content quality that everything else on this site is about.
LLM SEO agency, AEO agency, GEO: what the labels actually mean.
The vocabulary is a mess and some of it is marketing. Plainly:
GEO
Generative engine optimization. Came from the academic paper that first measured what makes generative systems cite a source. The oldest and most precise term.
AEO
Answer engine optimization. Same work with the emphasis on answer surfaces rather than the models behind them. In day to day terms, an AEO agency and a GEO shop sell an identical service under two names.
LLM SEO
The informal name that stuck in practitioner circles. An LLM SEO agency is again the same work. We use it because clients do.
AI SEO
The loosest of the four and sometimes means something else entirely, using AI tools to produce SEO work rather than optimizing to appear inside AI answers. Worth asking any agency which one they mean before signing anything.
The label matters far less than one structural fact, which the platform's published guidance on its AI features states directly: these surfaces run on the same quality signals as regular search, not a parallel machine. Which means an agency selling AI search as something detached from your technical health and your writing is charging you twice for one job.
Common questions.
What is the best AI SEO agency?
Open
The one that can show you a per-platform citation report from a real client, name the prompts it tracks, and explain how it measures share of answer. Almost every agency now claims this capability and far fewer instrumented it, so the qualifying question is not “do you do AI search” but “show me last month's platform breakdown for someone.” An agency that reports a single blended visibility score has answered you already.
How much does AI SEO cost?
Open
As a workstream inside a program, expect a few hundred up to a couple of thousand monthly, driven by prompt volume, platform count, and how much retrofitting your existing pages need. Sold as a standalone product at several thousand a month, be careful: the work depends on the same technical health and content quality as everything else, so buying it in isolation usually means paying twice.
Can you guarantee we will be cited in ChatGPT?
Open
No. Nobody controls what a model quotes, sources rotate heavily between identical queries, and any agency guaranteeing citations is describing something outside its control. What can be committed to is measurement, the specific work known to correlate with citation, and honest monthly reporting of whether it moved.
Do we need this if our SEO is already working?
Open
Increasingly yes, because the surface is moving rather than a new surface being added. Buyers now put questions to assistants that they used to type into Google, and an answer they read instead of your page is a visit you never see. The instrumentation matters most here: without per-platform tracking you cannot tell whether you are losing ground or simply have not measured it.
Should we block AI crawlers instead?
Open
That is a legitimate business decision and some companies make it deliberately. Just make it deliberately. Blocking means your content cannot be cited, which protects it from being summarized and removes you from the answers your buyers read. Most software companies selling to buyers who research with assistants conclude that visibility beats protection, but the decision belongs to you and the audit surfaces it rather than assuming it.
Run your buyer's questions and watch who gets named.
Send your domain and five questions your buyers actually ask. We will run them across every major platform, send back who gets cited and who does not, and show you the gap between your visibility and your closest competitor's.