MACHINE 404 / Three names, one question

AI SEO: what it is, and what it is not

AI SEO. AEO, answer engine optimisation. GEO, generative engine optimisation. Three names invented in about eighteen months for one question that is older than all of them: can software describe your business accurately without a human to interpret the page.

The part that is real

Assistants answer instead of listing. That changes what a website is for. A page used to compete for a click; now it also has to survive being read, summarised and repeated by something that will never see your layout. Structured data, a clean crawl path, a real 404, an offer that exists as data: all of that is mechanical, testable and either present or absent.

That is why it can carry a number. Eighteen checks, a weight each, a score out of 100 that anybody can re-run, including you, including a competitor, including us six months later.

The part that is a retainer with no number

A monthly fee to improve your visibility in AI. Ask three questions before you sign one. What is the number today. What will the deliverable be this month, named. What happens to the fee if the number does not move. If the answers are vague, you are buying an opinion at a subscription price.

And one thing sold hard right now that we will not sell you: llms.txt. Measurements show AI crawlers almost never request it, and Google has said it does not support it. We will write one for you at no charge if you want it, and we will tell you to your face that it is a bet.

Does it replace SEO? No, and that matters

Classic SEO decides whether a human finds you inside a list. This decides whether software can describe you, price you and pick you when there is no list. Different reader, different format, same customer. Nothing we do touches titles, URLs or copy that already performs: structured data goes alongside your pages, never in place of them.

How to test any claim in ten minutes

Ask whoever is selling you AI visibility to show you three things about your own site, now, in front of you: the structured data it publishes, what your robots.txt says to GPTBot by name, and what a made-up URL on your domain returns. All three are visible in a browser in under ten minutes and none of them is a matter of opinion.

If the answer is a slide about the future of search rather than those three facts about your site, you have learned what you needed to know. The same test works on us: the scan on the product page shows you your own data before you have given anybody an email address.