AI SEO Agency for ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews

What is AI SEO, and how is it different from SEO?

AI SEO is the work of getting your business named and cited when someone asks an AI assistant instead of scrolling a results page. It sits on top of ordinary SEO, because the engines still crawl, index and rank pages before writing an answer. What changes is what you measure and which sources end up mattering.

A rank tracker can tell you you’re fourth. An answer has no fourth place. You’re recommended, cited with a link, mentioned without one, described wrongly, or missing. Those are the outcomes we track.

You’ll see the field called generative engine optimization (GEO), LLM SEO or answer engine optimization. We unpick the overlap in GEO vs SEO, and explain where the term came from in what generative engine optimization is.

What can an AI SEO agency influence, and what can’t it?

An agency can influence whether engines can reach your pages, whether those pages are indexed and easy to quote, and what other sites say about you. It can’t buy placement, edit an answer, or change what a model already absorbed in training. Anyone selling guaranteed ChatGPT placement is selling something that doesn’t exist.

Factor	Can we move it?	How
Crawler access for AI search	Yes	robots.txt, CDN and firewall rules
Being in Google’s and Bing’s index	Yes	Technical SEO, sitemaps, IndexNow
How quotable your pages are	Yes	Direct answers, specifics, named sources
What third-party sites say about you	Partly	PR, reviews, directories, comparison pages
What a model learned in training	Slowly, indirectly	Changes only when new models ship
The wording of one answer for one user	No	Nobody controls this

Two primary sources back up the top rows. OpenAI says sites that block its OAI-SearchBot won’t be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Google says there are no additional requirements for AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet, and no special files or markup needed. So most of the ground you can actually gain is in answers built from live search.

What did the GEO research find, and where does it stop?

The study most people quote is GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Aggarwal and colleagues, presented at KDD 2024. Testing content edits against generative engines, the authors report visibility gains of up to 40% on their benchmark, and found that results vary by subject area.

The methods that helped most in their tests were adding citations to credible sources, adding quotations, and adding statistics. Keyword stuffing did poorly. That matches what we see when we read which pages engines cite: specific, sourced, plainly written pages over vague ones.

Keep two limits in mind. It’s a research benchmark, not a live engine, and the engines have changed a lot since. And it’s about how to write, which only matters once the engine can fetch you and has a reason to trust you. We treat it as writing guidance.

How does an AI visibility audit work?

An audit starts with prompts rather than keywords. We write the questions your buyers would put to an assistant, run each one through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews several times, and record who’s mentioned, who’s cited and which sources each engine relied on. Repeat runs matter because one answer is an anecdote.

For a Gulf business the prompt set usually needs both languages. A freight forwarder in Jebel Ali might test:

• “Which freight forwarders in Dubai handle temperature-controlled shipments to Saudi Arabia?”
• The same question in Arabic: ما هي شركات الشحن في دبي التي تنقل البضائع المبردة إلى السعودية؟
• “Is [company name] a reliable freight forwarder?”, the reputation question most audits forget.

The output is a sheet per engine: mentions, citations, competitors named and the pages behind them. Those pages become the target list. If Perplexity keeps citing a trade directory that doesn’t list you, that’s the fix. If an assistant describes you wrongly, with an old address or a service you dropped, we trace where it picked that up.

The plumbing: crawlers, Bing, entities and llms.txt

Most of the “invisible in AI” problems we find are plumbing, not prose. A firewall rule blocks a search crawler, Bing has barely indexed the site, or the business is described three different ways across the web. These fixes are quick, and they go first, because no engine can cite a page it can’t fetch.

Crawlers

Training bots and search bots are separate. Blocking GPTBot or Google-Extended keeps content out of model training without touching ChatGPT search or Google Search. Blocking OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Googlebot takes you out of answers. Sites regularly block the wrong one through a CDN bot setting nobody remembers switching on.

Bing and IndexNow

Copilot answers are grounded in Bing, and Bing Webmaster Tools now shows how often your pages are cited in Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries, a report in public preview since February 2026. We verify the site, submit sitemaps and add IndexNow, which Bing and Yandex support and Google doesn’t.

Entities

Your name, what you do and where you operate should match everywhere: your Organization schema, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories and press, in Arabic and English. Engines stitch these sources together, and contradictions get you described vaguely or skipped.

llms.txt

A proposed file that summarises your site for language models. It’s cheap to add and harmless, but don’t expect it to move anything on its own. Our guide to llms.txt covers what it can and can’t do.

Who should invest in AI SEO now?

AI SEO is worth paying for now if your buyers research by asking questions before they shortlist: B2B services, healthcare, education, software, professional services, travel and other considered purchases. It’s less urgent for impulse retail, or for businesses that win almost entirely on Google Maps, where local SEO does more.

If your site has basic problems, such as pages that aren’t indexed, thin content or no links, fix those first through our SEO services, because AI engines inherit them. The baseline run tells you which camp you’re in.

AI SEO in the Gulf, and where to start reading

We work from Dubai with clients across the Gulf, the United States and Australia, and the method is the same everywhere. The prompts, sources and languages change by market:

• AI SEO in Dubai
• AI SEO in Abu Dhabi
• AI SEO in Riyadh

If you’d rather try it yourself first, our walkthrough on how to rank in ChatGPT covers the steps we’d take in the first month.