Five layers of one job: search visibility in the AI era
Search hasn’t stopped mattering — it’s splitting into more channels. Google still sends the most traffic to most sites, but a growing share of people get their answer straight from ChatGPT, Perplexity, or an AI Overview without ever clicking through. Ranking well and earning the click is still necessary, but no longer sufficient.
These aren’t five separate services so much as five layers of the same job — presented the way we’d actually walk a client through them, in the order we’d tackle them if we were starting from scratch. Every layer links out to deeper breakdowns on the blog, and none of them assume you already know the jargon.
Start with the SEO audit — it tells you which of the other four actually matters for your site.
How these fit together
Technical SEO makes sure the site can be crawled and read at all. Content strategy and the SEO audit make sure what’s there is worth reading and structured well. AI SEO and GEO make sure that work is legible to AI systems, not just search engines.
Skipping a layer usually shows up later as a ceiling on results: a content strategy can’t fix a site an AI crawler can’t reach, and better crawlability doesn’t help content that never actually answers the reader’s question. That’s why these sit on one page rather than five separate pitches — knowing which layer you’re missing gets you further than jumping to whichever one sounds most urgent this week.
Where to start: new to this? Start with AI SEO for the big picture, or jump to the SEO audit if you have a live site and want to know what’s broken first. Worried specifically about showing up inside ChatGPT or AI Overviews? GEO is the most direct answer. Ranking fine in classic search but suspect something structural? Start with Technical SEO.
AI SEO
What SEO becomes once AI Overviews, chat assistants, and ranking models sit between a query and a click.
Traditional SEO optimizes for a ranked list of blue links. AI SEO optimizes for the same underlying signals — relevance, authority, structure — but for surfaces that summarize, synthesize, or converse instead of just listing. The ranking factors mostly overlap. The difference is what happens after a page is chosen: does a language model quote it, or does it just sit at position four with no one reading past the summary above it?
What’s included
- A review of how your key pages answer the questions people actually ask, and how cleanly a model can extract those answers
- Entity and structured-data checks — is it obvious who you are, what you do, and how your pages relate
- A crawlability pass, since AI crawlers still have to reach and parse a page before any of this matters
- A content-depth assessment — thin, isolated pages rarely get cited over a well-built cluster
- A prioritized list of changes, ordered by what’s actually blocking visibility versus a marginal improvement
How it works
- Baseline review across Google, AI Overviews, and the major chat assistants for representative queries.
- Gap analysis — what’s on the page versus what a model needs to answer confidently with it.
- Recommendations — a prioritized, plain-English list of what to fix first, with the reasoning.
- Optional follow-up — if you’d rather we implement the changes, that’s scoped separately.
For teams who already have organic traffic and content, and want a straight answer on whether their site is ready for how search is changing.
Go deeper: the AI SEO blog pillar →
GEO / AEO
Structuring content so AI systems can confidently cite it inside a generated answer — not just rank it on a results page.
Getting cited inside an AI answer works differently than getting ranked. There’s no single URL you’re competing against, and the model is synthesizing from multiple sources at once. GEO is the broader discipline; AEO narrows the focus to structuring a page so a specific question gets a clean, extractable answer. In practice the work overlaps almost completely — and being the clearest, most directly-answerable source often beats being the most comprehensive one.
What’s included
- An entity audit — is your brand, products, and authors described consistently across pages and schema
- A structured-data review — adding or correcting Organization, Article, Person, and FAQ schema
- A pass on your highest-intent pages so each leads with a direct, quotable answer rather than burying it
- A citation check — how your site currently shows up (or doesn’t) in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews
For sites that already rank reasonably well but rarely get cited inside AI answers — usually because entity signals are inconsistent or the content isn’t structured for a model to quote cleanly.
Go deeper: the GEO / AEO blog pillar →
Technical SEO
The plumbing layer: crawlability, indexing, and Core Web Vitals — before rankings, before AI citations, before any of it.
None of the content or entity work matters if a crawler can’t reach your pages, or if your site is slow enough that visitors — human or AI — leave before it finishes loading. AI crawlers like GPTBot and PerplexityBot have their own crawl budgets and their own patience for slow or broken pages, often less than Google’s.
What’s included
- Fix indexation issues first (noindex tags, canonical conflicts, orphaned pages) — these block everything downstream
- Submit and maintain an accurate XML sitemap
- Address Core Web Vitals — usually image weight and render-blocking scripts
- Confirm mobile-friendliness across your key templates
- Review structured data for errors or missing markup a crawler would flag
How it works
- Crawl the site — what search engines and AI crawlers can actually reach, and where they hit dead ends.
- Diagnose — every issue ranked by how much it’s actually costing you.
- Fix list — a prioritized, plain-English list, in the order we’d tackle it ourselves.
- Re-check — after fixes ship, we re-crawl to confirm they’re actually resolved.
For sites where something feels off — pages that should rank aren’t showing up, or traffic dropped after a migration or redesign.
Go deeper: the Technical SEO blog pillar →
Content strategy
Depth beats volume. A strategy built around clusters — one pillar page supported by a network of interlinked articles — signals authority and gives LLMs the context to trust a source.
Sites that rank consistently on a subject rarely got there with one lucky article — they built a cluster: a pillar page covering the topic broadly, supported by narrower posts that each go deep on one facet and link back. A deep, well-linked cluster also gives an LLM more corroborating context, which feeds directly into citation-worthiness.
What’s included
- A content audit — mapping what you already have against the topics you actually want to own
- Gap analysis — the supporting articles a pillar needs but doesn’t have yet
- An internal-linking review, since a cluster only works if the posts actually link to each other
- A prioritized content plan, ordered by which gaps cost you the most visibility
For teams publishing already but not seeing it compound — posts that rank briefly then fade, or a blog that grew large without a clear structure connecting it.
Go deeper: the Content Strategy blog pillar →
SEO audit
Most sites don’t need a hundred fixes — they need the three or four actually holding them back, found quickly.
Before spending time or money on new content, entity schema, or technical fixes, it’s worth knowing what’s actually broken first. The order isn’t arbitrary: a content or entity fix is wasted if the page can’t be crawled, so the checklist starts at the foundation and works up — crawlability and indexing, Core Web Vitals and mobile, content and structure gaps, then AI and entity signals.
What’s included
- A full crawl to see what search engines and AI crawlers can actually reach
- A written list of issues in plain English, ranked by how much each is likely costing you
- Specific recommendations for each issue — not just “fix your Core Web Vitals,” but what’s causing the slowdown
- A short list of what to do first if you can only tackle a handful right now
Errors an audit catches early
- Pages accidentally set to noindex, or blocked in robots.txt
- Duplicate or conflicting canonical tags
- Orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them
- Missing or broken structured data, and thin content competing against itself
For anyone who wants a straight, prioritized read on where a site stands before committing to a bigger project — a first check on a new site, or a second opinion after something feels off.
Have a specific site or situation in mind?
Tell us the URL and what feels off. You’ll get a straight, prioritized read — no jargon, no pitch.
Get your AI visibility audit