I work with companies anywhere in the world, and specialise in industrial and manufacturing businesses selling into supply chains, from local to global. Buyers, engineers and project managers put shortlist questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews before they contact anyone, and the companies named are the ones those systems can identify, retrieve and attribute. I make businesses visible to AI search, then help you enter new markets and close what comes in.
The check runs on your company, not on mine. You get a recorded walkthrough back.
Answer engines do not hand back ten blue links. They return a short list — usually a handful of named companies with citations attached — and a buyer can act on it without scrolling any further.
If your name is not in that list, you are not competing on price or capability; you are not in the conversation at all. That is an observation about how the format works, not a prediction about your business, which is why the first thing I do is look at your actual answers.
who are the best suppliers for [what you sell] in [your market]?
Based on the sources I can find, these are the ones that come up most often:
Illustration of the answer format — not a captured result. The free check produces the real version, with your name, your competitors and the date it was run.
Many modern sites build their pages inside the visitor's browser rather than on the server. Most AI crawlers do not run that code, so what they receive is whatever existed before it ran, which on some sites is a navigation bar and nothing else.
It is invisible from the inside: your analytics look normal, because the people you can measure are the ones whose browsers work. The free check reports on it first.
Vercel and MERJ tracked over 500 million GPTBot requests and reported in December 2024 that they found no evidence of JavaScript ever being executed: GPTBot requested JavaScript files 11.5% of the time and ClaudeBot 23.8%, and neither ran them. Google's Gemini and Applebot are the exceptions, because both reuse rendering infrastructure built for classic search.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of making a company's information retrievable and citable by AI systems that answer questions directly — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude — rather than returning a page of links. It matters now because those systems assemble an answer from a handful of retrieved passages and attach citations to them, so a business that is not retrievable in passage form is absent from the answer even when its website ranks well in classic search. Generative engine optimisation (GEO) describes the same discipline; the two terms are used interchangeably by buyers.
It is not a replacement for search engine optimisation. Answer engines still retrieve heavily from indexed web content, so a site that classic crawlers cannot read is a site answer engines cannot cite either. The two disciplines sit on top of each other, in that order.
Three published findings, each with the study, the date and the sample size attached, so you can check every one of them yourself.
of agencies report rising client demand for AEO and SEO for AI-driven search — the number one new service requested in 2026, ahead of paid ads (55%) and short-form video (51%).
AgencyAnalytics, 2026 Marketing Agency Benchmarks Report — 494 agency professionals surveyed, February–April 2026.
of AI citations came from sources a brand can manage or strongly influence — 44% first-party websites, 42% listings and profiles.
Yext, October 2025 — 6.8 million citations across 1.6 million AI answers from Gemini, OpenAI and Perplexity.
of pages cited in Google's AI Overviews also ranked in the top ten for the same query — down from 76% eight months earlier. Ranking and being cited are drifting apart.
Ahrefs, March 2026 — 863,000 keywords and 4 million AI Overview URLs, compared against the same study from July 2025.
Read together, the three say that demand is real, most of what gets cited is inside your control, and ranking alone no longer buys a citation.
The first is what the name stands for — SEO, AEO and GEO are one discipline, not three, and it decides whether a buyer finds you at all. The other two decide what happens next: whether the market was worth entering, and whether the conversation becomes a signed order.
AEO, GEO and SEO
Make the business resolvable as an entity, make its pages retrievable as self-contained passages, and make the third-party sources engines cross-check say the right thing. Measured as answer share and citation rate across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI Overviews.
Go-to-market strategy
Test whether a country or segment will actually buy before committing to a local hire. Segment definition, competitive reality, route to market and a live proposition test — ending in a hire, partner, persist or stop recommendation with the evidence behind it.
Win/loss and deal strategy
Discovery goes well, then the deal stalls inside the buying committee and nobody ever says no. Diagnose which stall it is, map who signs and who blocks, and reduce the buyer's downside rather than the price.
Being cited is not luck, it is a sequence: an engine has to identify you, find you, be able to quote you, and find the same story corroborated elsewhere.
Before an engine can recommend a company, it has to establish which company you are.
A written, versioned set of the questions your buyers actually ask, re-run unchanged so results compare month to month.
Retrieval works on passages, not pages, so every section has to make sense read entirely on its own.
Your website is not the whole picture: engines cross-check listings, profiles and third-party pages.
The same prompt set is re-run on a schedule, and citations, not traffic, are counted per engine.
AI visibility does not report itself in an analytics dashboard, so the chain from citation to enquiry has to be built deliberately. Every report uses the same five measures, from answer share through to assisted enquiries, and says plainly where that chain is weakest.
AI visibility is probabilistic. There is no ranking factor to buy, no position to hold and no lever any vendor controls end to end. That is a property of the technology, and it is worth being precise about before you compare proposals.
That distinction — between the part that is engineering and the part that is probability — is the whole discipline. Anyone who collapses the two is either confused or selling. You are entitled to ask which, and to ask it of me.
No, but it depends on SEO. Search engine optimisation gets a page indexed and ranked; answer engine optimisation makes a specific passage on it retrievable, quotable and attributable by an engine that answers in prose.
In practice, none: the two terms describe the same discipline. GEO comes from the academic literature, notably a 2024 KDD paper by Aggarwal and colleagues at Princeton and IIT Delhi; AEO is more common among buyers.
Ask what they measure. A rebranded SEO package reports rankings and traffic; an AEO engagement reports answer share and citation rate per engine, and covers your listings and profiles as well as your site.
A fixed set of buyer questions is re-run unchanged on a schedule, recording per engine whether you were named, whether one of your sources was cited, and who was named instead.
It depends on crawl and refresh cycles, not effort: changes have to be re-crawled and re-retrieved before they can affect an answer, and each engine picks them up at its own rate. Running the prompt set on a schedule makes the timeline an observation about your category rather than a promise.
No, and neither can anyone else: engines choose their sources at the moment they answer, using systems their operators change without notice. What can be controlled is whether your business is identifiable, readable and corroborated.
Usually not. Vercel and MERJ reported in December 2024 that the crawlers behind ChatGPT and Claude do not run JavaScript, so content that only appears after scripts run is invisible to them. That is a build problem rather than a content one, and the free check shows which situation you are in.
Companies anywhere in the world selling something a buyer researches before making contact, with a specialisation in industrial and manufacturing businesses selling into supply chains. Engagements run in English, and only a few at a time.
Send me your website and a few words on what you sell. I run a set of buyer questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI Overviews, and send back a recorded walkthrough of what came out: where you appeared, where you did not, who was named instead, and whether AI crawlers can read your pages at all. No charge, no obligation, and you keep the findings whether or not you decide to hire me.
I run these myself, so there is a queue. Expect a few working days rather than an instant report.
