Be the answer, not the tenth result.
More people are asking an assistant instead of scrolling a page of links. AI search optimization makes sure your organization is in those answers, described accurately, and that you can prove whether it is working.
Start a conversationSearch stopped being a list of links.
In the first four months of 2026, 68% of US Google searches ended without a single click, up from 60% in 2024. People are getting the answer on the results page instead of visiting the page it came from. At the same time ChatGPT passed 900 million weekly users, and a growing share of those conversations are people researching organizations, services and suppliers.
For you the consequence is simple. Someone asks about the work you do, an assistant answers, and that answer is the first impression, whether or not it came from your website and whether or not it is accurate. You are being described either way.
Zero-click figures: SparkToro analysis of Similarweb clickstream data, January to April 2026. User figure: OpenAI, February 2026.
Six things, in this order.
Find out where you actually stand
Before anything changes we ask the assistants directly. We run the questions your audience would really type into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini, record whether you appear, what they say about you, and who gets named instead. That transcript is the baseline everything else is measured against.
Make the machines certain who you are
AI systems answer confidently about organizations they can identify. That means consistent naming, a clean entity graph, structured data that actually validates, and the same facts about you in every place a model might look. Most of the sites we audit are contradicting themselves in three places at once.
Write content that can be quoted
Answer engines lift passages, not pages. Content that gets cited states the question plainly, answers it in the first two sentences, and backs it with something specific: a number, a date, a named source, a real example. We restructure what you have and write what's missing.
Let the crawlers in
AI crawlers are not Googlebot and they don't behave like it. Robots directives, llms.txt, render-blocking scripts, content that only exists after JavaScript runs, and aggressive firewall rules all quietly decide whether a model ever sees your page.
Keep the traditional side working
Google still sends most of the traffic, and AI Overviews are assembled largely from pages that already rank. Splitting AI search off into its own project is how organizations end up paying twice for the same fundamentals. We run both as one programme.
Re-measure, and show you the receipts
We re-run the same prompt set on a schedule and report the change: which answers now include you, which still don't, and what we're doing about the gap. Citation share against a named competitor set, not a vanity score.
Worth doing when people find you by describing a problem.
Nonprofits and foundations
Donors and grant officers research you before they ever reach your site. If an assistant summarises your work from a stale profile or a news story you didn't write, that's the version they get.
First Nations governments and public agencies
When someone asks an assistant about your Nation, your programmes or your services, the answer should come from you. Getting your own account of yourself into those answers is the whole job.
Considered-purchase businesses
Long sales cycles start with research, and that research increasingly starts with a chatbot. Being absent from the shortlist an assistant produces costs you the meeting before you know it existed.
If nearly all of your enquiries already come from people typing your name, this is not where your next dollar should go, and we will tell you that on the first call. See everything we do
We measure it, so we can show you.
Most agencies will tell you AI search matters. We can tell you what the assistants currently say about you, because we measure it before we touch anything. One of our clients is a Canadian contract food manufacturer. Nobody finds a manufacturer by browsing, they ask, and now they ask an assistant. We track fifteen real buyer questions across the major assistants continuously. This is where that account stood on 28 July 2026, its first day of tracking.
AI answers cited their site 40 times across fifteen buyer questions, twice as often as the next competitor.
First on nine of the fifteen buyer questions we track, and second on five more.
A guide published on 11 May was already cited more than every page but the homepage and About.
Visitors sent by AI assistants engaged more than visitors from search, ads, social or direct.
Comparing agencies? We checked every Canadian AI SEO agency with a named service. Top AI SEO agencies in Canada
The part most agencies would leave out
On certification and product-capability questions this client ranks first with no real competition. On city and region questions it appears every time but sits behind two competitors. That gap is the most useful line in the whole report, because it is the one that tells us what to do next.
Why citations, not share of voice
Share-of-voice scores compare a brand only against the competitors you nominated, so almost every brand comes out looking like the leader. We report citations against the full pool of sources an assistant actually pulled from, because that number cannot be improved by choosing a friendlier comparison set.
Continuous AI answer tracking, 15 buyer prompts, Canada, mid-2026 baseline. Client results shared anonymously.
Straight answers.
AI search optimization is the work of making sure your organization appears, accurately, when someone asks an AI assistant a question instead of running a traditional search. In practice it combines three things: structured data and consistent entity information so models can identify you, content written so a passage can be quoted as an answer, and technical access so AI crawlers can actually read the page. It is sometimes called generative engine optimization (GEO) or answer engine optimization (AEO). The names differ; the underlying work is largely the same.
It overlaps heavily but it is not identical. AI Overviews and assistant answers are assembled largely from pages that already rank well, so traditional SEO fundamentals still do most of the heavy lifting. What is genuinely different is the unit of success. Classic SEO optimises a page to hold a position; AI search optimises a passage to be quoted, and an entity to be recognised. That changes how content is structured, and it means you measure citations and mentions rather than positions. Anyone selling AI search optimization as something wholly separate from SEO is selling you the same work twice.
We build a set of real questions your audience would ask, run them across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini before we start, and record whether you appear and what is said. Then we re-run the same set on a schedule and report the change. The headline number is citation share against a named competitor set, meaning the proportion of those answers that mention you. We deliberately avoid share-of-voice style scores that move without anything real changing.
No, and you should be wary of anyone who does. These systems are probabilistic, they change without notice, and the same prompt can return different answers to different people on the same day. What we can do is remove the reasons you are currently invisible, make the correct information about you the easiest thing for a model to find, and measure the change honestly over time, including when it is slower than either of us would like.
Technical and structured data fixes can be reflected within weeks, because they change what a crawler reads on its next pass. Content and authority work is slower, usually a few months, because it depends on republication and reindexing. We re-baseline monthly, so you will see movement in the measurement well before you see it in enquiries.
Sometimes the honest answer is no. If almost all of your enquiries come from people who already know your name, your budget is better spent elsewhere and we will say so. It matters most when people find you by describing a problem rather than by typing your name, when the decision involves research, or when there is a real risk of an assistant describing your work inaccurately.
Curious what
the assistants say about you?
We'll run your prompt set and send you the transcript. No charge, no pitch attached.
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