Carries over from SEO
A site that search engines and AI crawlers can read.
Pages that answer the questions your buyers ask, in plain language.
Accurate business facts on your own site.
Mentions and links from sites people trust.
What changes when buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google's AI who to hire.
More people now ask AI assistants for answers, and when the question is who to hire, the assistant answers with a short list of names. AI visibility is how often your business is on that list. Marketers also call this work AEO, for answer engine optimization, or GEO, for generative engine optimization. Here is what changed, what carries over from SEO, and how to measure where you stand.
And reading what the AI says.
people use ChatGPT each week, OpenAI says.1
monthly users of Google's AI Overviews, Google says. It says AI Mode has passed 1 billion monthly users.2
of US adults say they use AI chatbots to search for information (Pew Research Center, February 2026).3
of B2B buyers in a Gartner survey of 645 said they used generative AI during a recent purchase, mainly to gather information on vendors and products.4
About half of US adults (49%) use AI chatbots, and six in ten say they read AI summaries at the top of search results.3
In February 2024, Gartner predicted that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026.5We found no independent count of total search volume that confirms or refutes that number, and Google's July 2026 earnings remarks say its AI features "are driving increased Search usage." 6
People are still searching. More of them now get an answer written by AI, at the top of the results page or in a chat window, before they choose who to contact.
People click less when it does.
In a Pew Research Center study of 900 US adults' Google browsing in March 2025, people clicked a traditional result link in 8% of visits to search pages with an AI summary and 15% of visits to pages without one.7 They clicked a link inside the AI summary in 1% of visits.7
Google disputes studies like Pew's and says total organic click volume from Search to websites has been "relatively stable year-over-year." 8
AI assistants also send relatively few visitors of their own. In a Conductor benchmark of more than 3.3 billion sessions across ten US industries, from May to September 2025, AI referral traffic made up 1.08% of website traffic.9
Our read for a small or mid-size firm: the value of AI visibility shows up before anyone visits your site. It decides whose names are in the answer, and a buyer who reads that answer starts from those names.
For accounting firms, referrals still lead. In TaxDome's 2025 survey of about 350 business clients, 58% found their current accounting firm through a referral and 17% through online search.10A referral gives a buyer your name. What they find when they look that name up, in Google's results or in an AI answer, becomes part of the decision.
Google's guidance says optimizing for its AI features "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO," and that there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode." 11 A site search engines can crawl, with clear pages that answer real questions, stays the foundation.
AI visibility extends that work to every assistant your buyers use. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI features each build an answer from their own set of sources. A peer-reviewed study of 11,500 queries (SIGIR 2026) found that Google's AI Overviews, Gemini, and Google's ranked results retrieve largely different sources, with average source overlap below 0.2 on a 0 to 1 scale.12 In a Conductor analysis of 167,867,680 Google AI Overview citations from June 15 to August 15, 2026, 43% of cited pages also ranked in the organic top 10 and 57% did not.13
A site that search engines and AI crawlers can read.
Pages that answer the questions your buyers ask, in plain language.
Accurate business facts on your own site.
Mentions and links from sites people trust.
Measuring how often each assistant names you, question by question.
A place on the directories, review sites, and list articles the assistants cite.
The same business name, location, and phone on every one of those pages.
Checking what the assistants say about you, and correcting it at the source.
Several names for one goal.
The older term. It was already in use in February 2018, when Search Engine Watch described it in the context of voice search and featured snippets.14 Today it is applied to AI assistants as well.
The term comes from a 2023 research paper by researchers at Princeton University, IIT Delhi, and two independent researchers, accepted to KDD 2024. It reported visibility gains of up to 40% in generated answers from methods such as adding citations, quotations, and statistics, measured on a 10,000-query benchmark.15 In the paper, visibility meant how much of the generated answer drew on a source.
Other names in use, and none is standardized. Most marketers still call the work SEO: 81% in a 2026 Fractl and Search Engine Land survey of 343 US marketing decision-makers.16
The term we use. It names the result you can measure: how often an AI assistant names your business when a buyer asks for what you do.
Several times each, because the answers vary.
We ask leading AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, the questions your clients type, several times each, and score how often your firm comes up and which firms are named in your place.
Google now reports part of this itself. Since August 31, 2026, Search Console has shown every site impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates for its appearances in AI Overviews and AI Mode.17That report covers Google's AI features. For ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, the way to find out is to ask them. We covered the Search Console side in our post on Google's AI search controls.
How often you are named, question by question.
The firms named in your place.
The websites the assistants cite, and which of them leave you out.
Whether AI crawlers can read your own site.
A fix list in priority order.
Directories, review sites, and list articles that show up as sources in answers for your market. We rank them by how often they are cited, so you start with the ones cited most.
The same business name, location, and phone on your site and on every profile, so an assistant reading several sources finds one consistent business.
If no assistant names you for a service or a type of client, give that topic its own page or FAQ section that says plainly what you offer and where.
Review what the assistants say about you, then fix anything wrong at the source the claim came from.
Make sure AI crawlers can reach your pages, and keep your business details clear on the site itself, with standard structured data.
Some popular fixes are unproven. An llms.txt file, a plain-text summary of your business for AI tools, is one. Google says you don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search.11 We put fixes like that last on the list.
Your digital marketing team can take this list off your plate, then run the same audit again so you can see what changed.
For CPA, accounting, and tax firms, financial planning and advisory firms, and fractional CFO firms. We ask leading AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, the questions your clients type, score how often your firm comes up, and email you the full report with a fix list. Free, one report per website every 30 days.
Run a different kind of business? We can run the same audit by hand. Book a 30-minute call and we will start there.
Sources
Company figures are as each company reports them. Studies marked as vendor studies or vendor surveys were run by companies that sell search or marketing services. Sources were checked in October 2026.
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