Guide
What is AI search visibility?
By Jay Friedman, Visibility Audit Co. Updated October 28, 2026.
How is it different from SEO?
SEO is about ranking pages in a list of links. An AI engine writes one answer that names a few products and cites a few sources. Being visible means being named in that answer. That depends on clear facts about your company, structured data, crawler access and mentions on trusted third-party sites, not just page rank.
What are GEO and AEO?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO) are two names for the same work: making it easier for AI answer engines to find, understand and cite a brand.
How do you measure it?
Run a fixed set of buyer-intent prompts, such as "best X for Y" and "X alternatives", in several AI engines on more than one day. Record which brands are named, in what order, and which sites are cited. Your share of voice is the percentage of answers that name you.
What makes AI recommend a product?
Four things matter most: whether AI crawlers can read your site; whether your site states clear, machine-readable facts (schema.org markup, llms.txt, readable text); whether trusted third-party pages like reviews, comparisons and forums mention you; and whether your pages answer buyer questions directly.
What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a plain-text Markdown file at the root of a website. It summarizes what the site is and links to its key pages, so language models can understand it quickly. It's a proposed convention, not an official standard.
Which AI crawlers should a SaaS site allow?
If you want to be recommended, allow the search and answer crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Googlebot) and consider allowing GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended on marketing pages. Keep app, account and user-data paths blocked.
How long until fixes show up?
Live-search engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT search can pick up changes within days or weeks of recrawling your site. Changes to what a model already knows take longer and are harder to predict. No one can guarantee placement.
Check your own site
The $49 AI Visibility Snapshot runs 10 buyer-intent prompts for your category and sends your top 5 fixes within 48 hours.