Be the business the AI recommends.
AI search optimisation, also called answer engine optimisation (AEO) or generative engine optimisation (GEO), is the work of getting your business named when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google for a recommendation. It is not a separate trick: assistants quote pages that already rank, answer a question directly, and state specific facts, and they describe businesses whose details match everywhere they appear online. Sevenoways does this work for Irish businesses inside our SEO plans from €399 a month and content marketing from €299 a month.
What's included
Answer-first content
Pages that open with a direct, quotable answer and state real figures, which is the format these tools lift.
Consensus signals
Your name, address, phone, services and prices made consistent across your site, Google profile and the directories assistants read.
Entity markup
Structured data describing your business, services and FAQs, so machines can read who you are without guessing.
Question research
The actual questions people ask assistants about your trade, turned into pages worth citing.
Review and mention building
More genuine reviews and third-party mentions, because assistants trust what others say about you more than what you say.
Crawler access
Checks that AI crawlers can reach your content, plus an llms.txt map of your site for the tools that use one.
AI visibility checks
We ask the main assistants the questions your customers would ask, record what comes back, and repeat it monthly.
Ranking still counts
The underlying SEO that gets you cited in the first place, because AI answers draw on pages that already rank.
AI Search — common questions
What is AI search optimisation?
AI search optimisation, also called AEO or GEO, is the work of getting your business named and cited in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and similar tools. In practice it means writing pages that answer questions directly, keeping your business details identical everywhere they appear, earning genuine reviews and mentions, and ranking well in ordinary search, because that is what these assistants draw on.
How is AEO different from SEO?
Traditional SEO competes for a position in a list of results. AEO competes to be the source quoted inside a single answer, where there may only be three or four citations in total. The mechanics overlap heavily, so the honest answer is that AEO is a shift in emphasis within good SEO, not a separate service you buy instead of it.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend my business?
No, and nobody can. Assistants do not publish rankings, and answers vary between users and sessions. What we can do is make your business easy to describe accurately, well reviewed, consistently listed and genuinely useful to quote, then measure what the assistants actually say month to month.
How do you measure AI search visibility?
We ask each assistant the questions your customers would ask, in the markets you serve, and record whether you are named, how you are described, and who is named instead. Repeated monthly, that shows movement. It is a crude measure compared with Search Console, and we say so rather than dressing it up.
How much does AI search optimisation cost?
It is not sold separately. The work sits inside our SEO plans from €399 a month and content marketing from €299 a month, because it is the same underlying job done with AI citation in mind. If someone quotes you a large separate fee for AEO alone, ask exactly what they would do that normal SEO would not.
Does my business need this yet?
If your customers research online before buying, yes, in the sense that the work overlaps almost entirely with SEO you should be doing anyway. If nobody searches before choosing you, this is not where your budget belongs, and we will tell you so on the call.
What is llms.txt and do I need one?
It is a plain-text map of a site aimed at AI crawlers, a little like robots.txt. Support is far from universal and Google does not use it for search, so treat it as cheap and harmless rather than essential. Our own site publishes one, and we set one up for clients where it fits.