Traditional SEO, at its core, is about what you say about yourself on the internet and how easy it is for Google to find it. You control the message. You build the pages. You optimise the technical structure. Google acts as the marketplace where people search, and your job is to show up when they do.
The newer AI SEO is fundamentally different. It’s about what the internet thinks about you.
The AI doesn’t just crawl your website and present it to users. It synthesises everything it can find about you from across the web, forms an opinion, and delivers that opinion as a recommendation. This changes what you’re optimising for, who you’re marketing to, and how your business gets discovered.
Content Overview
How AI Recommendations Differ from Search Results
When someone searches Google, they get a list of results, ten blue links (plus ads, maps, and features) that they evaluate themselves. The user is actively shopping. They click through multiple options, compare what they find, and make their own call. Google is the marketplace, your website is your stall.
When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or uses Google’s AI Mode, they get something psychologically different: a recommendation. The AI has already done the evaluation. It presents its answer with the confidence of a knowledgeable mate who’s researched the options and is telling you what they found.
In the traditional search model, getting on the first page meant you had a chance to make your case. The user would visit your site, read your content, and decide if you were right for them. In the AI recommendation model, the decision may already be made before anyone lands on your website. The AI has formed its opinion based on everything it found about you, and it’s recommended accordingly.
You’re marketing to the AI itself, which then recommends you to people.
What the Internet Actually Says About Your Business
When an AI forms its opinion about your business, it pulls from everything publicly accessible. This includes what you’ve said about yourself, but it extends far beyond that.
The AI considers:
- Your Google reviews from your Business Profile.
- Whether you appear in relevant directories and what those listings say.
- Reddit threads where people discussed their experience with you.
- Industry publications that mentioned your work.
- Forum posts, social media discussions, or third-party articles referencing your business.
All of this gets synthesised into a single perspective, and often shown to the user as well. That perspective forms the basis of whether you get recommended.
Which Businesses Are Most Vulnerable
This creates a particular challenge for businesses that have relied on personal selling to close deals. Companies that say “once we get in the room with people, they understand what we’re about” are in a vulnerable position.
If the internet doesn’t provide enough positive signal about your business, you may never get in those rooms anymore. Your prospects may never reach your website, never see your case studies, never experience your expertise firsthand.
Businesses that have invested in their digital presence by building genuine authority across multiple platforms, accumulated reviews, and established themselves in the broader online conversation are positioned to benefit. Those that relied on word-of-mouth and personal networks while neglecting their digital footprint face a new kind of invisibility.
What Sources does AI Reference?
Research into AI citation patterns reveals which sources carry weight:
- Google Business Profile reviews appear frequently, particularly for local service queries.
- Reddit discussions get cited when AI is looking for authentic user experiences.
- Industry directories and “best of” lists influence category recommendations.
- YouTube content with proper transcripts allows AI to reference video expertise.
Notably, AI platforms look for consensus. When multiple independent sources say positive things about a business, that creates a stronger signal than a single well-optimised website claiming excellence. Third-party validation carries weight precisely because the AI recognises it as independent of what you say about yourself.
This means building reputation across platforms, encouraging genuine reviews, participating in industry discussions, and creating shareable content has taken on new strategic importance. These activities always had value, but they now directly influence whether AI recommends your business.
How to Audit Your AI Perception
Most businesses have never audited their AI perception. They know their Google rankings. They track their website traffic. They may monitor their reviews. But few have systematically investigated what AI platforms actually say about them when asked.
Your business might have excellent search rankings while simultaneously receiving poor AI recommendations, perhaps due to negative Reddit discussions, missing from key directories, or lack of third-party validation. Conversely, a business with modest search rankings might be getting strong AI recommendations because of excellent reviews and positive online sentiment.
One amazing thing about AI tools, is you can ask why they think something and they will show their working. Query ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini with the questions your potential customers might ask:
- “Who is the best accountant in Perth?”
- “Which marketing agencies specialise in my industry?”
- “What do people say about [your business name]?”
The answers reveal your current position. Are you being recommended? What reasons does the AI give? How do you compare to competitors mentioned in the same response? Where is the AI getting its information?
There is no locked ranking like Google, you need to run each query at least 3 times on different tools and in incognito mode to get the consensus of the perception.”
What Most Businesses Discover
Businesses conducting this audit often discover uncomfortable truths:
- The AI may state inaccurate information about services, pricing, or location.
- It may recommend competitors while ignoring your business entirely.
- It may cite outdated information that no longer reflects your capabilities.
- It may reference negative experiences you weren’t aware existed online.
These gaps represent immediate opportunities. Incorrect information can often be addressed by strengthening signals elsewhere on the web. Invisibility in recommendations indicates a need to build presence across the sources AI references. Negative sentiment requires understanding the source and either addressing legitimate concerns or building sufficient positive signal to outweigh it.
How to Improve Your GEO (Step-by-Step)
Moving from understanding to action requires a structured approach. The following framework addresses both the foundational requirements inherited from traditional SEO and the new considerations unique to AI-driven discovery.
Step 1: Fix Your Owned Properties
Your website remains the primary asset where you control the message. Strong technical SEO ensures AI can access and understand your content. Comprehensive, authoritative content establishes your expertise on topics relevant to your business. Clear entity signals – About pages, author credentials, contact information, schema markup – help AI understand who you are and what you do.
This layer also includes ensuring AI crawlers can access your site. Configuration files like robots.txt and the newer llms.txt format guide how AI systems interact with your content. Blocking AI crawlers (sometimes done unintentionally through aggressive bot filtering) can make you invisible to the recommendation engine entirely.
Step 2: Optimise for AI Citation
Beyond the foundations, specific optimisation for AI citation improves recommendation likelihood. This includes structuring content to be easily extracted and quoted. Statistics, specific claims, and clear answers to common questions give AI something concrete to reference.
Expert positioning through author credentials, industry recognition, and demonstrated experience provides the authority signals AI looks for when deciding whether to trust a source. Monitoring how AI platforms perceive your brand over time allows measurement and iteration. Just as rank tracking became essential for SEO, AI perception tracking is becoming essential for GEO.
Step 3: Build Your Broader Presence
The most significant shift in GEO thinking involves optimising presence across platforms where AI forms its opinions:
- Google Business Profile requires active management and review cultivation.
- Industry directories need accurate, comprehensive listings.
- Social platforms (particularly those AI frequently cites like Reddit and YouTube) benefit from strategic presence.
- Brand sentiment monitoring across these platforms reveals how the internet talks about you when you’re not in the room.
- Digital Press Releases are much more important than they previously were, these are write ups about your company and your work written in second person, you can absolutely write and distribute these yourself.
This intelligence informs both defensive actions such as addressing negative sentiment and offensive strategy foramplifying positive signal in underrepresented channels.
Why This Shift Benefits Strong Businesses
The transition from search results to AI recommendations isn’t a threat to businesses with genuine expertise and strong reputations. The old model rewarded those who could optimise most aggressively for Google’s algorithm. The new model rewards those who have built real authority, delivered genuine value, and earned positive sentiment across the digital landscape.
For businesses that have been doing the right things, GEO is a chance to have those investments recognised in a new channel. For those that have been cutting corners or neglecting their digital presence, it’s a prompt to address the gap before invisibility becomes permanent.
The question is no longer “How do we rank on Google?” It’s expanded to include “What does the internet think about us, and how do we shape that perception?”
The businesses that answer this question honestly and act on what they find will be the ones that AI recommends.
If you’d like support auditing your brand’s perception online, contact us today for an audit.
Jack Headford
Account Manager & Operations Lead
