AI search optimisation — often called LLM SEO — means optimising your website so ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude cite your business when they answer relevant questions. It’s closely related to generative engine optimisation and answer engine optimisation — overlapping approaches aimed at the same broad goal of showing up inside AI-generated answers rather than just in a list of blue links.

I’m Simon McCullagh, an SEO consultant based in Newry, working with businesses across Northern Ireland and the wider UK. I build the AI SEO tooling I use with clients myself, including a tracker that monitors AI visibility across the major assistants, so this isn’t guesswork bolted onto old-style SEO — it’s measured, iterative work.

If you want a business recommended by AI assistants, the starting point is almost always the same as traditional SEO: you need to rank, be correctly represented as an entity, and produce content that directly answers the questions people are asking.

What AI search optimisation means

AI search optimisation is an umbrella term covering three closely related disciplines:

LLM SEO — optimising for large language models generally, including how they retrieve, weight and cite web content when generating an answer.
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) — a term that’s grown alongside tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, focused on getting content surfaced inside AI-generated responses rather than traditional search results pages.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) — optimising content to directly answer specific questions, which matters for AI assistants and for Google AI Overviews and featured snippets alike.

In practice the difference shows up in what you work on. LLM SEO looks at whether models can retrieve and correctly describe your business at all, for example checking how ChatGPT or Claude currently summarises what you do. GEO focuses on being one of the sources an AI answer draws on, for example covering the related sub-questions an assistant pulls results for. AEO focuses on the answer itself, for example putting a direct two-sentence answer under each question heading so it can be lifted cleanly.

All three still rest on SEO fundamentals: crawlability, indexing, topical depth and clearly structured content.

Where it differs from classic SEO is the emphasis: entity clarity (who or what you are, and how that’s stated consistently across your site and the web), answer-first content structure, and topical authority across a subject rather than isolated keyword targeting.

How AI assistants choose which businesses to cite

AI assistants don’t invent citations from nowhere — most rely heavily on search results. Ahrefs’ study of 1.4 million ChatGPT prompts found that pages surfaced via search are cited 88.46% of the time, which means you generally need to rank to be in the selection pool at all (Ahrefs, 2026).

That doesn’t mean you need to rank #1. Google AI Overviews cite pages ranking for related sub-queries, not just the exact query typed in — a behaviour known as query fan-out. Ahrefs found that only 38% of AI Overview citations come from a query’s own top 10; 31.2% come from positions 11–100, and 31% come from beyond position 100 entirely, because Google is pulling in results from the expanded set of sub-queries it generates behind the scenes (Ahrefs, 2026).

Practically, this means broad topical coverage across a subject matters more than chasing one exact keyword. If your site answers the adjacent questions a buyer might ask — pricing structures, comparisons, common mistakes, related terminology — you widen the number of sub-queries where you could be pulled in.

Entity and brand signals are likely to matter too, although the studies above didn’t measure them directly. AI assistants are trying to work out who you are, not just what your page says, so consistent naming, clear author and business information, and brand mentions across other sites plausibly help an AI assistant connect your content to a recognisable, citable entity rather than treating you as an anonymous page.

What I do to improve your AI visibility

I approach AI visibility as an extension of solid SEO work, not a separate service sold on hype. In practice that covers:

Measurement first. I use my own LLM Mentions tracker to see whether, and how, your business currently gets mentioned across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, before recommending any changes.
Technical and indexing basics. If pages aren’t crawlable or indexed properly, they can’t be retrieved by search — and therefore can’t be retrieved by an AI assistant either. This is the same technical SEO groundwork I’ve handled for clients through full site migrations, crawl-structure fixes and post-migration recovery.
Entity and topical authority. Building out coverage of a subject so your site is a recognisable authority on it, not just a single ranking page. I map this using a topical authority graph tool I built, which flags specific gaps — missing comparison pages, undefined terminology, or subtopics competitors cover that you haven’t addressed — across a topic cluster.
Citation-ready content. Structuring answers clearly near the top of a page — typically a direct one- or two-sentence answer immediately under the heading, followed by supporting detail and examples — using language an AI assistant can lift and attribute, rather than burying the answer under a long preamble.
Brand mentions. Encouraging genuine brand mentions across relevant sites, directories and publications. As noted above, this is an inference rather than a measured finding, but it’s consistent with how assistants identify a known, citable entity.

I don’t outsource any of this to a team of account managers — you work directly with me throughout.

Measuring AI visibility

You can’t optimise for AI search without knowing your current baseline. I track a set of prompts relevant to your business across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity using my LLM Mentions tracker, recording whether you’re mentioned, cited, or absent, and what’s cited instead.

This gives a realistic picture rather than a single snapshot: AI assistants return different answers to the same prompt over time, so tracking needs to be repeated rather than treated as a one-off audit. It also flags which competitors are being cited in your place, which can help highlight content or authority gaps worth closing.

You get a baseline report of where you’re mentioned, cited or missing.

AI SEO FAQs

What is LLM SEO?

LLM SEO is optimising a website so large language models and AI assistants — including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews — can find, understand and cite it when generating answers. It relies on the same foundations as search engine optimisation: crawlable pages, clear topical coverage, and content that directly answers real questions.

Is generative engine optimisation different from SEO?

Not fundamentally. Generative engine optimisation shares the same groundwork as SEO — indexing, authority, relevance — but places extra weight on answer-first content structure, consistent entity signals, and topical depth across a subject, because that’s what AI assistants draw on when assembling an answer rather than a ranked list of links.

How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?

Start by ranking for the topics relevant to your business, since pages surfaced through search are cited the large majority of the time. Beyond that, build genuine topical authority around your subject, make sure your business is described consistently as an entity across your site and other sources, and structure content so the answer is clear and quotable rather than hidden in dense paragraphs.

Does schema markup help with AI citations?

Based on independent testing, adding schema markup on its own had little measurable effect on AI citations (Ahrefs, 2026). Schema is still useful for helping search engines understand your content correctly and for enabling rich results, but that usefulness doesn’t extend to AI citation — ranking well and having clear, well-structured content matters more for that.

Check your AI visibility

Get a free SEO website report covering the technical and content basics that underpin AI visibility, or get in touch to talk through your situation directly with me. You can also see the full range of SEO services I offer alongside AI search optimisation.