SEO and AI search visibility, from one consultant
Search is splitting between results pages and answers generated inside a conversation with a model. Both reward clean technical foundations and genuinely useful, structured content, more than they reward either one in isolation, so I treat them as one connected job rather than the two separate services most agencies still sell.
Book a callNot a ranking. A named answer.
Three assistants, one goal: showing up inside the answer itself, not just on the page nobody scrolls past position three to reach any more.
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Cited: thebasilstudio.co.uk/services/kitchen-bathroom-marketingWhat each one is actually optimising for.
Optimising to rank in the ten blue links and win the click.
Rankings & backlinks
Domain authority and backlink profile still meaningfully influence where a page ranks in Google's results.
Keyword matching
Content structured around the specific phrases people type into a search box.
The win is a click
Success is measured by whether someone clicks through to the site. The page itself then has to do the converting.
Graded by evidence, not by what's trending in GEO threads.
Filled markers are backed by a confirmed source or a real study. The outline marker is a cheap, harmless addition, not a proven lever, and it's flagged as exactly that rather than sold to you as one.
Tells Google and Bing, both confirmed on record to use structured data, unambiguously which real-world business a page belongs to, rather than leaving it to infer from text alone. Every page on this site carries it.
Pre-shapes content as the exact question-and-answer format AI systems are built to extract from. Used across every service and industry page on this site.
Models lift sentences, not paragraphs. Burying the actual claim on page three of dense copy means there's nothing clean to quote.
None of this matters if GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or Google-Extended are disallowed in robots.txt, which happens more often than you'd think, sometimes by a hosting platform's own default settings, not the site owner's choice.
Worth having, it costs nothing and can't hurt: see this site's own at thebasilstudio.co.uk/llms.txt. But be wary of anyone selling it as a proven ranking lever. The largest public study to date found no correlation between having one and being cited, and Google has said on record it doesn't use it. Treat it as a cheap hedge, not a strategy, which is why it's marked differently to the rest of this list.
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The practice of optimising a website so AI systems, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, cite or recommend it inside a generated answer, rather than only optimising to rank on a traditional results page. As of 2026 it's largely absorbed what used to be called answer engine optimization (AEO) into one discipline rather than two.
There's real evidence for it, though the strength differs by system. Google and Bing Copilot have confirmed on record that they use structured data. ChatGPT and Perplexity haven't made an equivalent public confirmation, but third-party studies still show a measurable correlation between clearly structured, entity-clear content and how often it gets cited. It's one of the few GEO tactics with actual data behind it, not just a claim repeated by every agency selling GEO packages.
Not proven yet, be sceptical of anyone telling you otherwise. The largest public study on this to date, across roughly 300,000 domains, found no correlation between having an llms.txt file and how often a site gets cited, and Google has said on record it doesn't use it and has no plans to. I publish one on this site because it costs nothing to add, not because I can point to evidence it moves the needle.
Not outright, and not soon. What's actually happening is a split: some searches still end on a traditional results page, a growing share end inside a generated answer instead. Betting everything on one and ignoring the other is the mistake, not picking the wrong one.
A normal result is a link you click. An AI Overview is a generated summary sitting above the links, assembled from a handful of sources Google decided were worth pulling from, sometimes with a visible citation, sometimes without one. Being one of those sources still tends to require the same technical and content foundations as ranking well normally: it's an extension of good SEO, not a replacement discipline.
Slower to measure than traditional SEO, since there's no simple rank tracker for "did ChatGPT mention us this week". In practice, expect the technical foundations, schema, structure, crawl access, to take effect within weeks, while actually showing up inside AI-generated answers depends on the model's own training and retrieval cycle, which isn't something any consultant, including me, controls directly.
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