Is AI search optimisation worth paying for?

Buyers increasingly ask an assistant instead of searching, then act on an answer that names two or three companies. If you are not in that answer, you were not considered — and unlike a search result page, there is no second page to be on.

We sell this work, so the uncomfortable part goes first: for a good number of businesses it is not worth paying for yet. Here is how to tell which you are.

The test: does anyone ask an assistant about what you sell?

You can answer this in twenty minutes, for free, and it is the only input that matters.

1. Write down the five questions a buyer would ask immediately before choosing someone like you. Not "what is a CRM" — the deciding questions: "what should I look for in a CRM for a 20-person field service team".
2. Ask each of them in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI results. Use a logged-out or private session so your own history does not flatter the result.
3. Record what comes back: are companies named at all, which ones, and which sources are cited.
4. Then ask the same five as a buyer in each of your main markets, since answers vary by phrasing and region more than people expect.

When it is genuinely not worth it

• Your buyers do not research this way. Local trades, impulse purchases, anything bought from a map or a shelf. People find a plumber differently from how they find a software studio.
• You have no content and no intention of making any. This work has nothing to operate on. A model cannot cite a page that does not exist, and an optimisation retainer on a five-page brochure site is selling you process rather than outcome.
• Something earlier is broken. If your site is slow, thin or unclear about what you sell, fix that first. It helps every channel rather than one, and it is usually cheaper.

What the work actually is

Most of it is unglamorous and technical, which is worth knowing before buying something described as a content strategy.

1. Find out what crawlers receive, which is frequently not what you think you serve. We have found sites invisible to AI search for months because a CDN was returning a block page — should you block GPTBot covers that failure, and it is more common than it should be.
2. Make content quotable. Models quote passages, not pages. Self-contained answers, real questions answered plainly, no burying the point in paragraph nine.
3. Structured data that matches the page. Marking up something the page does not actually say gets the whole lot ignored.
4. Be present where the answers come from. Assistants lean heavily on directories, comparison sites and listicles. Being in those is often worth more than anything on your own domain.
5. Technical SEO. It has not stopped mattering, and most of it helps both channels — GEO versus SEO covers where the two genuinely diverge.

What it costs, and how it is usually sold

Two shapes in the market. A one-off audit, typically low four figures, tells you what crawlers see, what you are and are not cited for, and what to change — and is useful on its own. Plenty of businesses take the findings and act on them in-house, which is a sensible thing to do with them.

A monthly retainer only makes sense if there is enough ongoing content work to justify one. If a retainer is proposed before anyone has audited anything, that is a reason to ask what the first month will actually consist of.

Be careful of anyone promising a ranking position in an AI answer. Nobody controls that, the mechanics are not public, and the honest version of this service improves the odds rather than guaranteeing a result.

How to tell whether it worked

Harder than SEO, and anyone claiming otherwise is overselling. Attribution is genuinely poor: an assistant mentions you, somebody searches your name a week later and arrives directly, and nothing in your analytics connects the two.

• Re-run your five questions monthly, in a clean session, and record whether you are named. Crude, and the most direct evidence available.
• Watch referrals from assistant domains. Small numbers, usually, but they are real visits and they convert unusually well.
• Watch branded search volume. A rise with no other campaign running is often the trace an assistant mention leaves behind.
• Ask on enquiry calls how they found you. Still the best attribution tool anyone has, and it costs nothing.

Set expectations on time too: this moves in months, not weeks, because it depends on pages being crawled, indexed and then selected.

What we do

Our AI-search work starts with a fixed-price audit, and the first thing it establishes is whether this is worth continuing for you. We have told businesses to spend the money on directories instead, and that is a fine outcome.

We also do it on our own site and can show you what it did and did not change. How to get cited by ChatGPT covers the mechanics in detail if you would rather run it yourself.

Frequently asked questions