AI SEO: How to Check Whether ChatGPT and Google Can See Your Business

A client asked us for AI SEO. They wanted their company to "be in ChatGPT." In their own ChatGPT, it already was: the assistant knew the company and could talk about it. Then they typed the same question into Google. The AI Overview, the AI answer above the search results, said nothing about the company.

Both results were real. ChatGPT knew the company because the owner talked to it about the business all the time, and with memory turned on, ChatGPT draws on your past conversations. Google never saw those conversations. It only saw the website, and the website said nothing. The text sat inside images. No page answered a customer's question. A person saw everything. A bot couldn't even tell what the company does.

Your ChatGPT knows your business because you keep telling it about your business. Your customers won't.

That's why AI SEO starts with your website, not with a chat. It's the work of getting ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews to mention your business and link to your site. You'll also see it called GEO or AEO. Every business site now has two readers: a person and an AI bot. Before you pay anyone, check three things yourself: can AI bots reach your site, what do assistants say about your business, and do they cite your content? Below we show how to do it in an hour, using one business as an example. At the end there's a sheet you can fill in for yours.

What is AI SEO?

AI SEO means making your site easy for an AI assistant to find, understand and quote in an answer. Agencies often sell it as a new, standalone service. We see it as SEO, continued. The reader changes. The foundation doesn't.

The names all mean the same thing. GEO (generative engine optimization) comes from a research paper presented at KDD 2024. AEO (answer engine optimization) is the agency favorite. LLM SEO (an LLM is the kind of model behind ChatGPT) and "AI visibility" are other labels for it.

The labels skip the most important part. AI Mode is Google's conversational search. Google states that AI Overviews and AI Mode pull content from the same index as regular search. The index is the database of pages Google has crawled and stored. Not in the index, not in Google's AI answers.

That's why "SEO is dead, only AI matters" bothers me more than any other pitch. It sells well. But without solid SEO, an assistant has nothing to quote.

AI SEO vs traditional SEO: what actually changes?

Less than the sales pitches suggest. The foundation is the same: pages that load, get indexed and answer real questions. Three things do change.

One more source of confusion: "AI SEO" sometimes means using AI tools to do SEO work, like drafting product descriptions. This article is about the other meaning: showing up inside AI answers.

How do ChatGPT and Google learn about your business?

An assistant knows your business from one of two places. Either it "remembers" you from its training data. Then it answers without a link and may be out of date. Or it searches the web at the moment someone asks. Then it reads your site live and can link to it. You can influence the second one starting today.

Either way, a bot reads your site: a program that fetches web pages. AI companies typically run three kinds:

Google works differently. AI Overviews draw on the regular Google index, so there's no separate AI bot to let in.

So much for theory. To see what bots actually do, we checked 90 days of server logs, the record of every request to 30elevate.com. Three things stood out.

Bots mostly read the blog. Blog articles, not the homepage, made up more than half of ChatGPT-User fetches. Four articles accounted for three quarters of those blog fetches. An assistant doesn't visit "your website." It comes for one answer to one question.

A bot's name proves nothing. We found 456 requests carrying the name of one AI search bot. In 455 of them, the "bot" went looking for paths like /.env and /login: password files and login pages. A real search engine has no use for those. Most likely someone borrowed the name.

The assistant searches Google itself. In Google Search Console, Google's free dashboard for site owners, we see queries that read like chat prompts. One example: "before we as a mid-sized company invest in ai visibility, our cfo wants to know." People don't type that into Google. An assistant does, while it searches the web before answering in a chat.

How much traffic does AI SEO bring?

Not much, if you count clicks. In a February 2026 study of 76,000 sites, Ahrefs found that Google sends 190 times more traffic than ChatGPT. Anyone promising that AI will replace your Google traffic is promising something the data doesn't show.

That doesn't make AI visibility worthless. It's just measured differently, and agency reports tend to blur three numbers into one:

1. A bot fetch: a bot read the page, but you don't know yet whether it used anything.
2. A citation: the assistant named your business or linked to you, so the customer learned your name even without clicking.
3. A human visit: someone clicked the link in the chat and landed on your site.

Bots fetch our pages every day, while few people arrive from chats. That's normal. The assistant reads on the customer's behalf and answers inside the chat. Your analytics never see it. The value is in the second one, the citation: the assistant names your business to someone who asked about their problem, not about you. You can only measure it by hand or in the new reports from Google and Bing.

Bot traffic doesn't grow in a straight line either. Our user-triggered fetches more than tripled from June to September, then fell by roughly half in October. Nobody controls that curve. Anyone who guarantees it is promising something they can't deliver.

How do you check your AI visibility?

In about an hour, with free tools. You need a spreadsheet and six steps you'll repeat next month.

Let's take an example: Maria runs a bookkeeping firm in Austin. Her clients mostly ask what bookkeeping costs for an LLC and when an LLC should elect S-corp status. Here's her first hour:

1. Write down 10 questions your customers ask. Not your company name, the problem. Maria writes, for example, "how much does bookkeeping cost for an LLC in Austin" and "when should an LLC elect S-corp status."
2. Ask them in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google. Use a logged-out browser window or an account where you've never discussed your business. Otherwise the assistant will repeat what you once told it, like the client at the top of this article.
3. Log three things in a spreadsheet: whether your business came up, who the assistant named instead, and which pages it linked to.
4. Check what the assistant says about you. Ask directly what your company does, using its name. A wrong answer means your site says too little about it, or says it unclearly.
5. Open two free reports. Google Search Console has a report on impressions in AI features. Bing Webmaster Tools, Microsoft's free counterpart to Search Console, has an AI Performance report with Copilot citations.
6. Repeat after 30 days with the same questions and compare the sheets.

After an hour, Maria's sheet looks like this:

The takeaway is obvious. Her competitors list prices on their sites. Maria emails hers as a PDF. An assistant can't quote a price it has never seen. That sheet is your baseline. Without it you can't judge any proposal, because you don't know where you started.

What should you fix so assistants can cite your site?

An assistant will cite a page it can fetch, read as text and lift a ready answer from. The fix list is short. For Maria, it starts with pricing.

• Let the bots in. Check your robots.txt, the file that tells bots what they may not crawl. Block an assistant's search bot and it can't cite a page it never read.
• Put your content in the page's HTML as plain text, not only in images or scripts. A person can read a price list in an image. A bot sees an image file. Vercel's crawler data also shows the major AI crawlers barely run JavaScript, if at all. Text that appears only after a script loads usually never reaches them.
• Answer right under the question. Use the customer's question as a subheading, like "How much does bookkeeping cost for an LLC?", and answer it in the first sentence. Assistants quote passages, not whole pages.
• Add an FAQ with structured data. That's markup telling search engines where each question and answer sits.
• Keep your business details consistent. Same name, address, services and prices on your site, your Google Business Profile and in directories. The payroll error in Maria's sheet came from exactly that: an old directory listing.

We deliberately skip llms.txt, a table of contents written for AI models. Google's AI optimization guide says search doesn't use the file, and other providers promise nothing. We have one ourselves, because we use our own site as a test bed for everything new. But it's an experiment, not a fix.

Don't forget the first reader. When an assistant recommends you, the customer still visits your site. I do this myself: I ask AI about companies, then I always open their websites. If the page loads slowly, breaks on my phone or has photos that look AI-generated, I leave. A recommendation from AI is an invitation. The customer decides on your website.

We build these basics into every website we make for Google and AI assistants to read.

How much does AI SEO cost?

Part of it costs nothing but your time. You, or whoever edits your site, can handle the six-step check, the two free reports and the simple fixes. Moving a price list out of a PDF and onto the page is one of them. What you pay for is the hands-on work: restructuring pages, writing content that answers customer questions and repeating the measurement every month.

If you're hoping for citations fast and cheap, you'll be disappointed. AI visibility builds the way SEO does, over months rather than weeks. So the price depends on how much your site needs and how long the work runs.

It's early, and that's good news. The rules are still being written. Google keeps updating its AI optimization guide, most recently in July 2026. The term GEO dates from late 2023. In our view, few sites are ready for this yet, which leaves real room for those who move now.

New rules cut both ways: it's easy to promise things nobody can check yet. Watch out for four promises:

• Guaranteed citations. Nobody controls what ChatGPT or Google says. A promise of a set number of citations by a set date has nothing behind it.
• Growth percentages without a method. "300% more citations" means nothing unless you know which questions, which assistant and which period.
• A standalone "GEO" retainer cut off from your SEO. If AI Overviews draw on Google's index, AI work that skips the site itself is half the job.
• llms.txt sold as a ranking factor. See above.

A good proposal starts with a baseline like Maria's sheet and ends with a report on the same questions. That's how we run ongoing SEO and AI visibility work.

Frequently asked questions

Will AI replace SEO?

No. AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google's index, and Google still sends far more traffic than assistants do. AI SEO extends SEO with one question: can an assistant quote your page? Without SEO there's nothing to quote.

How long does AI SEO take to work?

It depends on where the assistant gets its knowledge. A user-triggered bot sees changes immediately. A search index takes longer, because the bot has to come back. Training data changes only with a new model version. In practice, measure after 30 days and judge the trend over several months.

What if ChatGPT says something wrong about my business?

First check whether the correct facts are on your site, stated plainly, as text, in one place. Assistants tend to guess where a site stays silent. We explain why models make things up, and how to limit it, in why AI hallucinates.

Does AI-written content hurt your visibility?

Not by itself. Google doesn't ban AI-assisted content, but it penalizes mass-produced pages with no value for readers. What counts is whether your page answers the question better than the others.