Hot take from someone who sells AEO and GEO services: most people are optimising for AI search while skipping the SEO it sits on.
The stack right now is llms.txt files, prompt trackers and citation dashboards. Meanwhile the same site has a service page that says "quality solutions for your needs" and has never been opened in Bing Webmaster Tools. Then someone asks why ChatGPT keeps naming a competitor.
Google's Danny Sullivan put it this way at WordCamp US in 2025: "Good SEO is good GEO, or AEO, AIO, LLM SEO, or LMNOPO." Google's AI features documentation agrees: no additional requirements, and no new machine-readable files or AI text files needed.
But Google doesn't speak for ChatGPT, so here's the data on both sides.
| Study | Finding | What it means for my argument |
|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs, 1.9M AI Overview citations | 76% rank in Google's top 10 | Supports it, for Google's AI |
| Seer, 500+ ChatGPT citations | 87%+ match Bing's top 20, 56% match Google's | Supports it, though the sample is small |
| Ahrefs, 15,000 prompts | 12% of ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot citations are in Google's top 10 | Against it: ranking on Google alone isn't enough |
| Ahrefs, 75,000 brands | Very weak correlation between link metrics and AI mentions | Against it, if your SEO means backlinks |
My read: ranking isn't the same as being recommended, but the work that gets you ranked is most of the work that gets you recommended. Treat it like a debugging problem, and start at the bottom of the stack.
Step 0: Rule out flaky results
SparkToro ran 12 prompts through AI tools 2,961 times and found a less than 1 in 100 chance of ChatGPT giving the same list of brands twice. One answer is a sample of one.
Ask ten real customer questions, five times each, in new chats. Count the share of the 50 answers that name each business. If you're at 2 out of 50 and they're at 30, it's a real gap.
Step 1: Check crawler access
OpenAI's crawler docs say sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers, apart from navigational links. GPTBot is a separate crawler for training, so you can block one and allow the other:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
robots.txt is only half of it. A firewall or CDN can block the bot before robots.txt ever matters, so test with its user agent:
curl -sI -A "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot" https://example.com/services
A 403 is a clear sign of a problem. A 200 doesn't fully clear you, because some firewalls also check the source IP, so compare your logs against OpenAI's published IP ranges.
Step 2: Check you're in the index
Search for the question on Google and Bing. If the competitor is on page one of both and you're nowhere, stop calling it an AI problem. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools if you haven't, given the Seer numbers above.
Step 3: Check your content exists without JavaScript
Google's list includes keeping important content available in text. Check what's in the raw HTML:
curl -s https://example.com/services | grep -i "what you actually do"
No match means the copy is either rendered client-side or was never written. Don't assume every crawler runs your JavaScript. And if the copy says "quality solutions", you've got a content bug, not a rendering bug.
Step 4: Check your structured data matches the page
Google asks that structured data matches the visible text. Generating schema from one source and the page from another is an easy way to let them drift apart.
Step 5: Look at who else mentions you
This is the one that isn't on your server. Ahrefs' study of 10,000 brands found Reddit threads (0.75), web pages (0.70) and news articles (0.67) all track AI mentions closely. It's correlation, not causation, but open the links ChatGPT shows you. If they name your competitor and not you, that's your backlog.
Step 6: Only now, the AI-specific layer
Prompt tracking and quotable answers can help, and I sell them, so weigh that as you like. But they're the finishing layer. An llms.txt file on a site nobody can find won't save it.
This is an opinion, not a study. Most of the data above is correlation, and some of it is from 2025. If your results say otherwise, I'd genuinely like to see them in the comments.
Full article: Why ChatGPT Recommends Your Competitor: You Probably Skipped the SEO
I'm Asad Abdullah Zafar. I build AEO, GEO and SEO systems at Loop2Tech, a technology studio in Karachi, Pakistan.
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