When customers ask AI who to choose, does your business appear?

AI Search Visibility is about whether your business can be found, mentioned, cited or recommended when people use AI to research who to hire, what to buy or which companies to consider.

You may also see this described as Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), AI SEO or AI Search Optimization.

The terminology varies, but the commercial question is much simpler: when your potential customers ask ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, Perplexity or another AI platform about the services you provide, does your business appear in the answer?

Soluma calls this AI Search Visibility because we focus on that outcome rather than the acronym.

Google itself acknowledges terms such as GEO and AEO, while making clear that there is no special GEO hack required to appear in its generative AI search experiences.

Start by making sure AI and search systems can find, understand and verify accurate information about your business.

For ChatGPT Search specifically, OpenAI says public websites can appear in search results and recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot to access content you want to be discovered, surfaced and cited.

But crawlability is only the starting point. Your website should also clearly explain:

• what services you provide
• who those services are for
• where you operate
• the problems you solve
• what each service includes
• common customer questions
• pricing or cost considerations where appropriate
• your experience, credentials and evidence
• why a customer should consider your business

Information about your business beyond your own website matters too. Industry directories, reputable publications, professional associations, review platforms and other credible third-party sources can all help establish a clearer picture of the business.

In Whitespark's 2026 expert survey, dedicated service pages ranked #2 for AI-search visibility, while prominent industry sources, authoritative third-party mentions and review platforms were also among the highest-rated factors.

Your competitor appearing in an AI answer does not necessarily mean they are a better business. It may mean the information available about them is easier to find, understand and verify.

Common gaps can include:

• unclear or weak service pages
• important customer questions that are not answered
• little information about pricing, suitability or how services work
• inconsistent business information
• weak third-party mentions
• limited presence on relevant industry websites
• insufficient reviews or proof on credible platforms
• pages that cannot be properly crawled
• competitors being referenced by sources the AI system relies on

The important question is therefore not simply: why isn't ChatGPT showing me? It is: what information and sources are helping my competitors appear when I don't? That is something that can be investigated.

For local businesses, current industry research places expert-curated lists, dedicated service pages, industry-relevant domains, authoritative third-party citations and review platforms among the strongest observed AI-visibility signals.

You cannot force ChatGPT or another AI platform to recommend your business, and nobody can legitimately guarantee that it will.

OpenAI states that ChatGPT Search uses multiple factors intended to surface reliable and relevant information and that there is no way to guarantee top placement.

What a business can improve is the information available for AI systems to work with. That can include:

• clearer service information
• stronger answers to buyer questions
• useful cost and pricing information
• accurate business and location details
• genuine credentials and proof
• relevant reviews
• authoritative third-party mentions
• industry directory presence
• useful original content
• technically accessible pages

The objective is not to trick an AI system into recommending you. It is to make your business easier to find, understand, verify and consider when the system is answering a relevant customer question.

Google similarly recommends valuable, original, non-commodity content rather than content created simply to manipulate generative AI responses.

There is no public formula that determines which businesses ChatGPT will recommend for every question. OpenAI says ChatGPT Search ranking uses multiple factors designed to help people find relevant and reliable information.

The answer can also change depending on factors such as:

• the exact question being asked
• the service or problem described
• the user's location
• the information available on the web
• which sources are relevant to that question
• how current that information is
• the AI platform being used

That is why testing only "tell me about my company" does not tell you much about your real AI Search Visibility. The more useful test is to ask the questions a potential customer would ask before they already know your company exists. For example:

• Which kitchen renovation companies should I consider in Singapore?
• Who are the best family lawyers for a difficult divorce in Manchester?
• How much do dental implants cost in Perth and which clinics offer them?

Those are the moments where being present, or absent, becomes commercially meaningful.

SEO and GEO are closely connected, but they focus on different parts of how people discover information.

Traditional SEO focuses largely on helping your pages become discoverable through search engines. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and AI Search Visibility focus on how your business and information are represented when an AI system constructs an answer.

In practice, there is significant overlap. Google explicitly says that its existing SEO best practices remain foundational for appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode. It does not require special AI schema, special AI files or a separate technical markup system.

So Soluma does not treat AI Search Visibility as a replacement for SEO. We look at an additional question that traditional rankings alone cannot answer: when your customer asks an AI who to hire, which companies actually get named?

Do not judge your AI visibility from one search, one question or one platform. Different questions can produce very different answers.

A useful AI visibility check should examine the types of questions customers ask while they are:

• discovering providers
• comparing companies
• researching a specific problem
• investigating prices or costs
• evaluating different solutions
• looking for specialist expertise
• deciding who is worth contacting

Soluma's AI Search Visibility service tests these real buyer questions across major AI platforms and compares your visibility with the businesses repeatedly being named instead.

We then investigate why those differences may exist, across your website, important service pages, crawlability, business information, customer questions, proof, reviews and relevant third-party sources.

You see the actual questions and results rather than being given only an abstract AI visibility score. From there, the objective is to improve the parts that are genuinely within your control and measure the same important buyer questions over time.

We do not promise guaranteed rankings, guaranteed AI recommendations or a fixed number of leads. We show you where you stand, what appears to be influencing the result, and what is worth doing about it.