Your buyers stopped searching. They're asking.

SEO earns you a position in a list of links. AI search optimisation earns you a mention inside the answer itself — when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews or Gemini a question, whether your organisation is named, how it is described, and whether it is recommended. The two overlap but are not the same discipline: search engines rank pages, answer engines synthesise sources. It is also called Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) or Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO).

No. OpenAI states that advertising does not influence the answers ChatGPT gives. ChatGPT Ads is a separate, clearly marked placement that runs alongside answers — it does not buy your way into the organic response. Being recommended inside an answer is earned, through the authority and consistency of what is published about you. Any agency implying otherwise is selling something that does not exist.

Because of what answer engines actually draw on: credible third-party coverage, consistent published facts, and sources the model already treats as trustworthy. Earning those is media relations, which is our discipline and always has been. Technical foundations matter too, and we do that work — but the technical layer alone cannot make a model cite you if nothing authoritative says anything about you.

We test it. We run the questions your buyers actually ask across the major assistants, record whether you are mentioned, what is said about you, which sources are cited and who is recommended instead. That produces a baseline you can hold — not an opinion about whether you "should" be visible, but a record of what the assistants said on a given date, repeatable later to show movement.

That is a reputation problem, and it is one of the more common reasons organisations come to us. Answers are assembled from what is published — so outdated coverage, inconsistent descriptions or an unanswered claim can be repeated back to buyers as fact. The work is correcting the underlying record: publishing clear, structured, consistent source material and earning authoritative coverage that supersedes the stale version.

Yes, and we treat them as separate layers with separate measurement, which matters more than it sounds. Paid placement is measured on impressions, engagement and conversions. Organic answer presence is measured on mentions, wording, citations and recommendation frequency. Keeping them apart prevents the most common mistake we see: crediting advertising for a change in what the assistants say organically.

Technical and structured-data fixes can be reflected within weeks. Changes driven by earned authority follow the media cycle and take longer — coverage has to exist and be indexed before a model can draw on it. We baseline at the start and re-test on a defined cycle, so progress is evidenced rather than asserted. Nobody can promise a specific position in an AI answer, and you should be wary of anyone who does.

No, they are two halves of the same question. AI Search & Discovery is about how your organisation appears in other people’s AI systems. AI Human Proof, our governance and assurance framework, is about whether the AI you deploy yourself is transparent, accountable and under meaningful human control. Clients frequently need both, and they are scoped separately.