When somebody asks AI about your industry, does your name even come up?
Go find out right now. Seriously, open up ChatGPT and ask it to recommend the best companies in your space.
Are you on the list? Or is it cheerfully recommending three of your competitors and not even mentioning you exist?
A giant and rapidly growing chunk of buying decisions now kick off with a question to an AI, not a search on Google. People are asking Claude what software to buy. They’re asking Perplexity which agency they should hire. They’re asking Gemini whether your brand is actually worth the money. And the AI just…answers. Confidently. With a short little list of names. And if yours isn’t sitting in that handful of names, then as far as that buyer is concerned, you flat out don’t exist…there’s no page two to scroll down to anymore, no “well at least I ranked #6.” You’re either in the answer or you’re nowhere.
That’s what all this AIO stuff is really about, making damn sure your brand is the one the machine recommends.
Quick word on all the acronyms, because they’re confusing on purpose
You’ll see this stuff called a few different things, so real quick…
AIO (AI Optimization) is the big umbrella, the whole effort of getting found and recommended across the AI tools. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) leans toward being the clean, citable answer to a direct question. And GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is about showing up inside the response the AI actually writes back, not just getting buried in the list of sources at the bottom.
Are these genuinely different things? A little, ish. But mostly it’s the same work aimed at slightly different targets, and the SEO industry is going to keep right on inventing letters because that’s just what it does 😂 We don’t care what you call it. We care that your brand is the one getting mentioned.
Here’s how we make that actually happen:
1. AI Visibility Audit
Start here, because you genuinely can’t fix what you can’t see.
We run your brand through all the major AI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, the whole gang) across the actual questions your customers are asking, and then we show you the truth of where you stand…where you show up, where you absolutely don’t, and where your competitors are popping up instead of you. We dig into what the AI says about you when it DOES bother to mention you (sometimes it’s wrong, and sometimes it’s worse than wrong), which sources the models are leaning on to build those answers, and exactly what the gaps are between you and whoever’s currently getting recommended. Then you get a prioritized list of what to fix first.
This is the diagnostic. It tells us, and you, precisely where you stand and what’s actually worth doing about it. Most clients are a little horrified by what the AI is out there saying about them, which, honestly? Good. Now we can fix it.
If you’re already tracking your brand in an AI tracking tool like Profound, let us know and share the data, and you can skip this step.
2. Reddit Brand Mentions
Because the AI reads Reddit constantly, and people trust it, that’s where you need to be.
The big models lean HARD on Reddit (for now anyway, maybe not forever). It’s one of the single most-cited sources across the board, partly because of the licensing deals the AI companies signed and partly because it’s where actual humans give actual unfiltered opinions. So when you ask an AI for a recommendation, there’s a real decent chance it’s quietly summarizing some Reddit thread to get there.
Which means if your brand keeps showing up in the right Reddit conversations, in a way that reads genuine and not spammy as hell, you’re feeding the exact source the AI trusts the most. We help you build a real, credible presence in the subreddits that actually matter for your space…authentic participation, useful contributions, brand mentions that don’t reek of an ad and won’t get you instantly nuked by the mods. Done right, this is honestly one of the highest-leverage moves you can make for AI visibility right now.
Done wrong, it gets you banned and makes you look desperate. So, you know…don’t do it wrong. That’s sort of what we’re here for.
3. Listicle Visibility
The AI absolutely loves a good “top 10” list, so let’s go get you onto them.
When an AI recommends “the best X for Y,” a huge amount of the time it’s pulling straight from listicles…the “10 Best Project Management Tools” posts, the “Top Agencies for Z” roundups, all of it. Those articles end up as grounding data, and the brands featured in them quietly get recommended downstream by the AI. So we work to secure you placement. We hunt down the high-authority listicles and roundups that are ranking and/or the AI tools are genuinely citing in your space, and then we do the work to get you included, mentioned, or bumped up the list. Sometimes that’s straight outreach, sometimes it’s handing the publisher a genuinely good reason to add you (even if that good reason is $$$), and sometimes it’s just getting a flat-out wrong or outdated listing corrected.
Every credible list you land on is another vote the AI counts when somebody asks who it should recommend. Stack up enough of those votes and you slowly become the default answer.
4. AI Content Optimization
Make your OWN content the thing the AI keeps quoting.
Your website and top ranking content is still a primary source these models pull from, but here’s the catch…most content was never built to get cited, it was built to rank on Google, which is a related-but-genuinely-different game. The AI tools want clear, structured, quotable, actually-useful answers they can lift and attribute without choking on it. So we rebuild your content to be exactly that…structured so the AI can parse and extract it cleanly, written to directly answer the real questions your buyers are asking, backed with the kind of specifics and clarity that make a model trust it enough to cite, marked up properly so the machines actually understand what they’re looking at, and aimed at the topics where you actually want to be showing up.
This is the part where a lot of those old-school SEO fundamentals still earn their keep, just pointed at a brand new target. We make your content the answer, instead of page seven of the search results that nobody on earth scrolls to.
How these actually fit together
Most clients kick things off with the AI Visibility Audit, because it tells us where the gaps are and what’s going to move the needle fastest for the least money. From there we usually run some mix of the other three, weighted heavily toward wherever your biggest holes / competitive gaps happen to be.
You really don’t have to buy all four, and honestly you probably shouldn’t right out of the gate. Start with the audit, fix whatever’s most broken, and build from there.
On pricing, it’s scoped to the actual work, since “get me mentioned on Reddit” and “rebuild my whole content library for AI citation” are wildly different lifts. The visibility audit is a fixed-price starting point, and everything past that we’ll quote once we actually see what you’re working with. Just ask and we’ll put real numbers in front of you, no mystery-meat estimates.
Your customers are out there asking AI for recommendations today, right this second. The only question worth answering is whether it’s saying your name, or your competitor’s…so let’s make it yours.