Being in the sentence, being the source it quotes, and being the business it picks. They are sold as three products. They are one discipline, and you are probably missing exactly one of them.
Most local businesses do not know what this is yet, but they need it. As we move into the age of agents doing the majority of search, everything has to be optimized for AI agents and humans at the same time.
Nick, Founder and CEO of 945 Studios
Needing the work and needing a separate invoice for it are two different things, and most of this industry is counting on you not noticing the gap. The signals that get a business named in an AI answer are largely the ones that have always mattered. What changed is the standard, not the workload. So we do the work, and we do not bill it as its own product.
For twenty years the deal was the same: you typed something, you got ten links, and you picked. Being fourth still meant being seen. When a machine answers instead, it does the picking. Two or three businesses get named and the rest of the market is not in the conversation at all, with no impression recorded anywhere you can look. Three overlapping disciplines have grown up around that change, and most of the industry is selling them as three separate products.
The difference between them is what the machine is doing at the moment you want to be present. Read the row that matches your problem and go to that page. You do not need all three pages, and you almost certainly do not need three invoices.
You are competing for the sentence. The machine blends many sources into new prose about your category and often names nobody in particular. The job is to be part of what it believes about your trade in your area. Go here if assistants describe your category without ever mentioning you.
Learn moreYou are competing for the citation. Somebody asks one specific question, the machine answers it and names where the answer came from. The job is to be the source it names. Go here if you get the same questions on the phone every week and your site answers none of them.
Learn moreYou are competing for the decision. An agent reasons across everything it can find and picks one business to act on. The job is to be the one it picks. Go here if you want the furthest-out view of where this is heading.
Learn moreAnd underneath all three, still carrying almost all of the volume and almost all of the money, is ordinary search. If you are starting from nothing, you start there. The SEO page is the honest first stop, and the local SEO plans are where the AI tracking already lives.
AI SEO is the work of being visible to AI search systems rather than only to a list of blue links. In practice it is three overlapping jobs: being named inside the prose an assistant writes about your category, being the source it quotes for a specific question, and being the business an agent chooses when it acts on someone's behalf. Most of the underlying work is shared across all three.
Less than the name suggests. The signals that get a business into AI answers are largely the ones that have always mattered: a consistent and accurate profile, reviews with real volume and recency, mentions on sites you do not own, and plain pages that answer real questions. What changes is the standard the writing has to meet, because a machine can only quote a sentence that survives being lifted out of the page.
No. AI search tracking is included in both of our local SEO plans, because the work that feeds it is the work we were doing anyway. If you are being quoted separately for SEO, then GEO, then AEO, you are paying three times for one discipline.
You need the work, you do not need it as a separate line item. AI assistants are still well under one percent of total search volume, and they are also growing several hundred percent a year. Both are true. The sensible response is not a separate retainer and not ignoring it, it is doing the fundamentals to a standard that serves both, and measuring monthly so you see the shift coming rather than reading about it afterwards.
We run your business through ChatGPT, Google's AI answers and Perplexity, and send you what came back, including who got named instead of you. No charge, and no obligation to do anything about it. The profile and review signals those engines actually read are listed out in our free checklist for getting named in AI answers. If the site itself is what is holding you back, the Lightspeed build is where most of our clients start.