How to Improve AI Search Visibility Across Different AI Engines

TL;DR: To improve AI search visibility, brands need to look beyond rankings and understand how they’re discovered, understood, and selected across different AI engines. Strong SEO provides the foundation, but it doesn’t guarantee visibility everywhere.

Every few weeks, the SEO versus GEO debate comes roaring back to life. This time, John Mueller kicked it off. As reported by Roger Montti in a Search Engine Journal piece, in a recent exchange on Bluesky, someone asked whether certain industries, like adult or gambling, need to consider generative engine optimization “where Google still seems to drive most discovery.”

Mueller’s response was (and I’m quoting word-for-word here), “I’m not quite sure what you’re asking. From our POV, there’s nothing really special you need to do for generative AI responses in search.”

And you know what? I think he’s right. For Google.

The problem starts when we take advice about Google and apply it to AI search as a whole. Because Google isn’t ChatGPT. ChatGPT isn’t Perplexity. And Perplexity isn’t Gemini. Optimizing for one doesn’t guarantee you’ll appear in another.

What is AI search visibility?

AI search visibility is how consistently and accurately your brand, content, products, or expertise appear in AI-generated answers for the questions that matter to your audience. That can include:

• Being cited as a source
• Mentioned as a brand
• Recommended alongside competitors
• Used as part of an AI-generated answer

And importantly, AI search visibility isn’t confined to one platform.

A brand might have excellent visibility in Google AI Overviews but rarely appear in ChatGPT. Another might be frequently recommended by Perplexity but barely surface in Gemini. You can even see different answers from the same engine depending on the prompt, context, or timing.

That’s why I don’t consider “Do we show up in ChatGPT?” a sufficient measure of AI visibility.

You need to understand where you appear, for which prompts, how you’re represented, which sources are contributing to those answers, and how that visibility changes across engines. Understanding that becomes especially important when we start asking whether traditional SEO alone is enough.

The same content doesn’t surface the same way across AI engines

I stumbled across a Reddit post where the poster had built an AI-assisted content pipeline designed for output volume and wanted to know what SEO and GEO fundamentals they could bake into it going forward.

The poster wanted to know what they could bake into their pipeline to make the same content more citeable across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Their question was essentially: What should I add to make this system GEO-friendly?

That’s a reasonable thing to want. But it’s also where the GEO (or generative engine optimization) conversation gets messy, especially if we’re still talking about “AI search” like it’s one search engine.

Their system was the kind of system a lot of marketers and content engineers are building right now: automate the research, generate the drafts, add the links, run the quality checks, distribute the content, and move on to the next piece.

What caught my attention wasn’t really the request for tips. It was the assumption underneath it.

The fundamentals travel across engines, but the retrieval systems don’t.

SEO best practices working in Google’s AI products don’t mean every AI system discovers, retrieves, and selects information the same way Google does. 

Google can tell marketers what works for Google’s AI experiences because Google knows exactly how those experiences connect to its search infrastructure. But that doesn’t tell us how ChatGPT will discover the same information, whether Perplexity will select it, or how another answer engine will weigh it against competing sources.

I don’t think the useful question is whether SEO “works for GEO.” The more useful question is which parts of SEO carry across the AI search ecosystem, and where the engines start behaving differently.

Google rankings and ChatGPT citations aren’t the same thing

A few months ago, I interviewed Alex from SEOForge on Found in AI. His team had analyzed roughly 500,000 user queries across Google Search and ChatGPT to understand what performed across the two systems.

His team found differences between the engines, but one of the most interesting findings was the role of specificity. Google can surface pages that have spent years accumulating the signals needed to rank for a broad keyword. But an interaction with ChatGPT can quickly become more specific as the conversation continues.

And that changes the information the system needs.

Alex explained that when someone asks a very specific question, having information that actually answers that question can matter more than whether you’ve traditionally optimized a page around the corresponding keyword.

And one of the things his team saw working particularly well in ChatGPT? Unique insight.

Meaning original data, first-hand expertise, customer research, surveys, and information that actually adds something new to the conversation. That’s not exactly the same playbook as “pick a keyword, write the best optimized article, and build links to it.”

There’s overlap, sure. Like, a lot of it. But just because there is overlap doesn’t mean there is equivalence.

There isn’t one GEO algorithm

There is no single GEO algorithm, and this is why I think asking for a universal “GEO checklist” is the wrong question. We’re not optimizing for one system.

In another Found in AI conversation, Kristina Frunze and I talked about how messy AI visibility measurement becomes when you account for the number of systems involved.

Different AI systems can draw on web search, their underlying training data, and other retrieval mechanisms in different ways. They don’t necessarily use the same sources, produce the same citations, or even return the same answer when you repeat a prompt.

That’s why one of the experiments I’ve recommended on the podcast is ridiculously simple:

1. Take one query that matters to your business.
2. Run it through Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.
3. See which brands get mentioned.
4. Look at which sources each system uses.
5. Run it again and compare the results.

When you run this test across engines, you’ll quickly see why I’m uncomfortable with blanket statements about what “works for GEO.” There are multiple systems making different decisions about which information to retrieve and which information to use. A universal GEO checklist doesn’t account for that.

So, do you need to do anything differently for GEO?

If you’re already doing excellent SEO, you’re probably starting with a very strong foundation:

• Your website should be crawlable
• Your pages should have clear structure
• Your internal linking should make sense
• Your entities should be understandable
• Your claims should be sourced
• Your content should answer actual questions your audience has

I’m not suggesting marketers throw SEO out the window and start sprinkling magic GEO dust over their websites. Quite the opposite, actually.

SEO is part of the foundation. But I wouldn’t stop there simply because Google’s AI products respond well to traditional SEO practices.

What information does my brand have that these systems would actually want to retrieve?

That’s the next question to ask, and it brings me back to that Reddit post.

The poster had built a sophisticated pipeline for producing more content. They were looking for the next optimization step they could automate. But if the goal is visibility across AI systems, another automated optimization step may not be what the pipeline is missing.

It might be missing information worth retrieving.

You can automate headings and schema. You can even automate internal links, metadata, formatting, and plenty of your technical QA.

But it’s much harder to automate the customer interview that reveals something nobody else has published. Or the proprietary data that answers a question competitors can’t. Or the SME who has spent ten years doing the thing everyone else is summarizing. Or the experiment that produces an original finding.

And if AI systems have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of perfectly optimized pages to choose from, I suspect that distinction — adding hard-earned insights only your brand has — will only become more important.

How to improve AI search visibility

If you want to improve AI search visibility, start with an audit rather than immediately producing more content. Be sure to run this audit across all major AI engines, not just ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews. 

A mini AI search visibility audit should answer several questions:

• Where are you visible now? Choose a representative set of high-value money prompts and test them across multiple relevant engines, such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews or AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot.
• How are you represented? Look beyond whether your URL gets cited. Is the brand mentioned? Recommended? Described accurately? Are competitors appearing when you aren’t?
• Which sources are influencing the answers? Look at your own pages as well as third-party sources. Reviews, media coverage, industry publications, communities, directories, podcasts, and other external mentions can all contribute to the wider information environment around your brand.
• Is your brand clearly understood? Compare how you describe your company, category, products, expertise, and audience across your website and major third-party profiles. Conflicting positioning makes the entity harder to understand.
• Does your content contain information worth retrieving? Audit for original data, SME insight, first-hand experience, clear answers, useful comparisons, statistics, examples, and other information that goes beyond summarizing what already exists.
• Can machines access and understand it? Check crawlability, indexing, page structure, internal links, headings, structured data where appropriate, and other technical fundamentals.
• Where are the gaps? Finally, compare your visibility with the competitors AI systems are already mentioning. The goal isn’t merely to find what you’re doing wrong. It’s to understand what evidence the engines currently have about them that they don’t have about you.

You’re looking for patterns across the ecosystem. That gives you a much better starting point than asking, “How do I rank in ChatGPT?”

Where can I find expert help for AI-driven search visibility?

A comprehensive AI visibility audit is an in-depth process, which is why many brands look for expert help with AI-driven search visibility rather than trying to diagnose every engine on their own. As an AI search visibility consultant, I help startups and enterprise brands understand where they appear across AI search, why competitors may be earning visibility they aren’t, and what they can do to improve it.

I help startups and enterprise brands understand and improve their visibility across AI-driven search through AI Search Visibility Audits and ongoing AI search strategy.

My audits aren’t designed to hand you another SEO checklist with “GEO” slapped across the top. I look at:

• How your brand is actually being discovered, represented, and cited across relevant AI engines
• Where competitors are winning visibility
• What those systems appear to understand about your brand
• Where your content and authority gaps are
• Which changes are most likely to improve your visibility.

The result is a prioritized strategy for what to fix, what to create, where to build authority, and what to measure going forward. If you don’t know what your AI search visibility looks like outside the engine you happen to check most often, that’s where to start.

Meet Cassie

Hi, I’m Cassie, an AI search visibility consultant and fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands who focuses on AI search optimization.

If AI-generated answers are already influencing your buyers, your content strategy needs to account for that. I build content programs that connect strategy with execution: clear positioning,  systems, and content that actually drive revenue. If you’re ready to stop guessing and start growing, here’s how we can work together.

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