AI SEO that gets you cited in ChatGPT, not just ranked.

People increasingly ask an assistant instead of typing a keyword: the best option for a particular need in a particular city, whether a product is worth it, who to call. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode answer in sentences and name a handful of businesses. If you are not one of them, the enquiry goes elsewhere before you ever had a chance to rank. AI search optimisation, sometimes called generative engine optimisation or answer engine optimisation, is the work of becoming one of the businesses those tools describe confidently and recommend by name.

How AI search differs from traditional SEO, and how it does not

Traditional SEO aims to rank your pages in Google's list of results. AI search optimisation aims to get your business cited, mentioned or recommended inside the answers AI tools write. The foundations overlap almost entirely: a fast, crawlable website, clear content and authority from other sites. AI search puts extra weight on being mentioned consistently across trusted sources, answering questions directly, and structuring content so it is easy to quote. Google still sends most search traffic, and many AI tools pull live results from search engines when they answer, so strong SEO makes AI visibility easier and AI work strengthens your SEO. We treat them as one strategy rather than two projects, and we are wary of anyone selling GEO as a replacement.

Clear facts first: what you do, where, and for whom

AI tools recommend businesses they can describe confidently. That confidence comes from clear, consistent information about what you do and where you operate, repeated identically on your website, your Google Business Profile, directories and social profiles. Structured data on your site, including Organisation, Service, Product and FAQ schema, helps assistants read those facts accurately rather than guessing. We also check that AI crawlers are allowed to read your site at all, because a robots file written years ago can quietly block the very tools you want to be found in.

Content an assistant can lift and credit

Answer engine optimisation means structuring content so a search engine or assistant can lift a direct answer from it: a concise answer near the top of the page, headings phrased as the questions people ask, FAQ sections, and expertise written in plain language by people who understand the product. The same pages tend to win featured snippets and Google AI Overviews, and they convert better for human readers too, because a buyer with a question gets an answer rather than a wall of keyword-stuffed copy. Thin pages written for density are the first thing we remove.

Mentions, reviews and the sources AI tools trust

Each AI tool draws on slightly different sources, but they share a preference for businesses that appear consistently in reputable places: genuine customer reviews, New Zealand directories, media coverage and industry sites. We strengthen the signals the tools share rather than chasing one platform, and we track how your business appears in each one. Small and niche New Zealand businesses can do well here, because AI tools answer specific questions and favour clear, well-supported answers, and relatively few local businesses are doing this work yet.

Measured on citations and enquiries, reported live

We build a set of questions your customers actually ask and test them across the major AI tools on a schedule, recording whether your business is mentioned, cited or linked and how it is described compared with competitors. We pair that with Google AI Overview presence, branded search demand and referral traffic from AI tools in your analytics, all tied to enquiries and orders in Refined Analytics. Visibility is only worth having if it turns into visits and enquiries, so that is what we report, weekly, from the people doing the work.