Define the questions
Ten to twenty questions your buyers would genuinely ask an assistant. Fixed, so results are comparable over time.
AI & Next-Gen Search · Delhi NCR & remote
Search is now several products.
Your customer might type into Google, ask ChatGPT, use Perplexity for research or have Copilot inside their work software. Those are four different products with four different behaviours and one shared foundation.
Short answer
AI search optimisation is the practical work of being visible across every surface that answers rather than lists: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini. The foundation is shared — crawlable, clear, credible, consistently described — but each surface behaves differently and needs monitoring separately.
Five surfaces, one foundation
Monitored separately
No guarantees anywhere
Helps classic SEO too
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01 The premise
One foundation, several audiences.
It is tempting to treat each new AI surface as a separate project with a separate budget. That is mostly wrong, and expensive. The overwhelming majority of the work — being crawlable, describing yourself clearly, publishing something genuinely specific, being consistently identified across the web — serves every one of them at once, and serves conventional search as well.
What genuinely differs is behaviour, and therefore measurement. Perplexity cites sources prominently and visibly, so you can see immediately whether you are being used. Google AI Overviews appear for some queries and not others, and change without notice. ChatGPT behaves differently when browsing than when answering from memory. Copilot inherits Bing’s index, which is a genuinely different index from Google’s.
The practical consequence is that you build once and monitor several times. And the honest consequence is that if your budget is limited, you should spend it on the shared foundation rather than on chasing one surface — because the surfaces will keep changing and the foundation will not.
02 The surfaces
The surfaces, and how each behaves.
What differs in practice, from repeated observation rather than from vendor documentation.
| Surface | What matters about it |
|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | Served through Google Search and drawing on its ranking systems. Blocking Google-Extended does not remove you; only leaving Google Search does. Appears inconsistently by query and changes frequently. |
| ChatGPT search | Browses live through OAI-SearchBot and cites sources. Behaves quite differently from ChatGPT answering out of training data, and the distinction matters when you test it. |
| Perplexity | The most citation-transparent of the group, which makes it the best surface to measure against. If you cannot get cited here, the content is usually the reason. |
| Copilot | Built on Bing’s index. Worth remembering that Bing indexes differently from Google, so Bing Webmaster Tools is genuinely worth setting up. |
| Gemini | Google’s assistant. Google-Extended governs whether your content is used here, unlike AI Overviews. |
03 Foundation
The shared foundation that serves all of them.
Do these once. They pay into every surface, including ordinary search.
Build once
- Be crawlable by the retrieval bots. A deliberate robots.txt decision, made with the training-versus-retrieval distinction understood.
- Describe yourself unambiguously. What you do, for whom, where. Stated plainly on a page, not implied through positioning language.
- Be one entity everywhere. Consistent name, description and details across every profile, tied together with sameAs in your schema.
- Publish something specific. Prices, processes, comparisons, constraints. Anything a machine could quote and a human could check.
- Answer questions directly. A clear answer near the top of the page, which is exactly what every one of these surfaces is looking for.
- Keep it current. A genuine review date. Retrieval favours pages that look maintained, and so do readers.
- Do not block your own search presence. The most damaging mistake available here, and it happens through misunderstanding Google-Extended.
Free AI visibility audit
Ask five assistants the same question.
I will run the questions your buyers would ask across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini, and send you the answers with citations. Most businesses have never seen this.
- All five surfaces, screenshotted
- You keep the findings either way
- I will tell you what is not worth chasing
- Same-day reply, all 7 days
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Four details, and a real reply today.
04 Monitoring
How it is monitored.
Manual, repeatable, and honest about its own imprecision.
Ask every surface
The same questions across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini. Recorded with screenshots.
Record who is cited
Not just whether you appear — who appears instead. That list is usually the most useful output of the whole exercise.
Act on the gaps
Usually a missing page, an unclear description or an inconsistency between profiles. Rarely exotic.
Repeat monthly
Same questions, same surfaces, recorded. Including the months where nothing moved.
— AI & Next-Gen Search
Related services.
These sit next to AI search optimisation and are usually bought with it. Same person doing the work in each case.
AEO Services
Be the answer, not result #7.
Read moreAnswer Engine Optimization
How answer engines actually pick.
Read moreGEO Services
Get cited by ChatGPT and Gemini.
Read moreGenerative Engine Optimization
The method, explained in full.
Read moreAI SEO Services
AI in the workflow, not the writing.
Read more— Questions
AI search optimisation — your questions.
Straight answers, including the ones that cost me work. If yours is not here, ask it — I reply the same day.
Being visible across the surfaces that answer rather than list — Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini. The work is largely shared with SEO; what differs is that each surface behaves differently and has to be monitored on its own.
They are overlapping labels for the same territory. AEO usually refers to answer surfaces inside a search engine, GEO to generative assistants, and AI search optimisation is the practical umbrella covering both. The distinctions are useful for organising work, not for arguing about definitions.
The one your customers actually use, which for most Indian businesses is still Google — so AI Overviews matter most. Perplexity is worth monitoring because its citations are the most transparent, which makes it a useful early indicator of whether your content is usable as a source.
Yes, one thing: set up Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. Bing has its own index and it powers Copilot, so a site well indexed in Google is not automatically well indexed there. It takes twenty minutes and is regularly skipped.
No. Everything in the shared foundation — clear answers, valid schema, consistent identity, current content — helps conventional search as well. That is precisely why it is worth doing even if you are sceptical about how large these surfaces will become.
For most small and mid-sized businesses, nothing extra: do the foundation work as part of ordinary SEO and monitor the surfaces occasionally. A large separate AI-search budget makes sense for businesses whose category is already being answered rather than listed. I will tell you honestly which one you are.
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See yourself across all five surfaces.
One audit, five surfaces, real screenshots and the citation list. You will find out who is being recommended in your category — and you keep the findings either way.
- All five surfaces, recorded
- Shared foundation with your existing SEO
- I will tell you what is not worth chasing
- You keep the findings either way
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