Frequently asked questions

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) are common industry framings for getting brands recommended in AI search platforms. When a customer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, or Claude what to buy, AEO and GEO are the work that decides whether your brand gets named.

Same thing, different framings. In practice, agencies use them interchangeably. We work in both.

Only 12% of pages cited by AI rank in Google's top 10 for the same query (Ahrefs). AI doesn't rank pages, it synthesizes recommendations from a wider pool: product feeds, review platforms, community discussion, editorial coverage, entity databases. A brand with weak SEO and strong third-party coverage can get recommended over a brand with perfect SEO in the AI response.

Good SEO is real work and it compounds. It does part of what AI visibility needs. But if your strategy stops at SEO, you've optimized for one engine and missed a growing share of where buying decisions happen.

900 million weekly ChatGPT users. 2 billion monthly Google AI Overviews users. 58% of consumers have replaced search engines with generative AI for shopping research (Capgemini). AI-referred retail traffic grew 693.4% during the 2025 holiday season (Adobe). AI-referred shoppers flipped from converting 49% worse than other traffic in early 2025 to 31% better by the 2025 holidays (Adobe).

The question isn't whether it's big. It's whether your brand is in it.

OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity have shipped product cards, merchant integrations, and checkout flows inside their AI interfaces. That's billions in platform investment that's compounding, not reversing. Once a customer gets a faster, more specific buying interface, they don't revert to scanning ten links. Prior ecommerce channels (Google, Amazon, Instagram, TikTok Shop) heavily rewarded brands that moved early. The same pattern is playing out here.

Partly. The work has some overlap. Some of the foundations (clean schema, fast site, real content) help with both. But AI synthesis uses inputs SEO doesn't touch: product feed data, merchant platform integrations, review platform presence, community signals, entity databases. A brand can rank #1 in Google and still be invisible to AI. The audit pattern repeats every time we run one.

If an agency tells you AEO is identical to SEO, ask them how to optimize for the Agentic Commerce Protocol or Shopify's AI Storefronts. If they can't answer in specifics, they're applying SEO thinking to a different problem.

You can measure visibility frequency across many queries. You can measure revenue from AI-referred traffic. You can measure citation share against competitors over time. What you can't measure is a single ranking position, because AI recommendations are non-deterministic. The same query returns different answers on different days.

Any agency reporting "you rank #3 for [query] in ChatGPT" is misrepresenting how the technology works. Real measurement is frequency, distribution, and revenue attribution. That's what we track.

No. AI recommendations are non-deterministic. The same query returns different answers on different days. Any agency promising guaranteed rankings is misrepresenting the technology.

You can't guarantee a single result, but you can move the distribution. A brand mentioned in few queries today and mentioned consistently three months later has moved. What we commit to is visibility frequency trending up against your starting baseline, with every move backed by documented research about why it should work.

They will. They do. The platforms update their ranking signals frequently and rarely announce changes. That's why we built the Adaptive Research Engine: daily platform monitoring, weekly research scanning, monthly methodology updates, and emergency response for major shifts. When a platform changes how it ranks, our system catches it quickly and the methodology gets updated to incorporate it.

Most agencies in this space run on opinion. When a platform shifts, they're guessing. We're not.

Those tools show you the score. We change the score. Many brands use a monitoring tool alongside the optimization work. They're complementary, not competing. The tool shows where you're invisible. We're the team that makes you visible.

If you've used a monitoring tool, you've seen this: a dashboard says you're at 23/100 AI visibility, and then what? Nobody writes the schema, optimizes the feeds, rewrites the descriptions, or builds the authority signals. That's where we come in.

Because most of them added a page to their website and changed nothing about how they work. Their DNA is backlinks, keyword rankings, and content calendars. AI doesn't rank your website. It decides whether to mention your product when someone asks a question. Different inputs (feeds, schema, review quality, content freshness, community signals, third-party citations) produce different outputs.

An SEO agency bolting on AEO is the same team running the same playbook with a new label. The question to ask: what changed about their methodology when they added AEO? If the answer is vague, the answer is nothing.

Enterprise agencies are built for $10K-$25K monthly retainers and the brands that can support that spend. Different operating model, different price point, different ICP. We specialize in growth-stage DTC ($2M-$50M revenue), flat-fee sprint pricing instead of monthly retainer lock-in, and a methodology purpose-built for growth-stage DTC Shopify brands at our price tier.

Most YC-funded AI visibility startups target B2B SaaS. Their tools and methodologies are built for that use case (B2B content strategy, knowledge graph optimization for technical docs, thought-leadership SEO). DTC ecommerce has a completely different optimization stack: product feeds, merchant integrations, review platforms, agentic commerce protocols. The work doesn't transfer cleanly.

Sometimes. If you have a senior person with technical SEO background, time to dedicate, and access to current research on AI platform behavior, they can do meaningful work. Most teams don't have all three. Building the methodology, audit infrastructure, and research operation from scratch takes significant hours we've already invested. The sprint costs $7,500. Math usually pencils for outsourcing.

We're also happy to train an in-house lead. Some clients run the sprint, then transition the ongoing work internally with us on a quarterly review retainer.

$7,500 flat fee, one-time. Includes diagnostic audit across all five AI platforms, the AI Visibility Blueprint (your strategic operating model), Implementation Kit (optimized content, schema code, product feeds, Knowledge Base setup), Brand Authority Playbook (your team's off-site execution guide), Pre-Build Checkpoint, Pre-Delivery Strategy Call, and a 30-day re-audit measuring what moved.

Optional $2,000/month retainer available after the sprint for ongoing optimization. Month-to-month, cancel anytime with 30 days notice.

Three to four weeks from kickoff to final delivery. The sprint runs through six stages: diagnosis, blueprint construction, implementation, pre-delivery review, final handoff, and a 30-day re-audit.

Four artifacts. The AI Visibility Blueprint (strategic priority matrix, every signal classified by tier and strategic move). The Implementation Kit (optimized content, production-ready schema code, product feed specs, Knowledge Base configuration). The Brand Authority Playbook (specific publication, community, review platform, and creator targets with outreach scripts). The 30-day re-audit (visibility delta measurement against baseline).

The work isn't a PDF of recommendations. It's finished files your developer can deploy in hours, not weeks.

For the on-site work (schema, feeds, content updates, technical fixes), yes. We hand you production-ready code with deployment instructions. The implementation is scoped to deploy in 3-5 hours of developer time. Some lighter work (review platform claims, off-site authority targets) can be done by a marketing person without developer involvement.

We can also recommend developers if you don't have one.

We're built for Shopify and Shopify Plus. The methodology is platform-agnostic in principle, but our implementation kit, feed specs, and tactical playbooks are Shopify-specific right now. If you're on BigCommerce, WooCommerce, or headless, talk to us. We scope custom engagements case-by-case and pricing differs from the standard sprint.

No. AI visibility work is largely additive. We touch product feed data and on-site schema (overlap with SEO, but improvements not regressions). The off-site authority targets are different from typical SEO link building (review platforms, communities, creators vs traditional backlinks). The work runs in parallel with paid campaigns without conflict.

If you're worried about specific overlaps, we cover it on the kickoff call.

We guarantee the work, the methodology, and the measurement. We don't guarantee specific AI rankings because nobody honestly can. The sprint scope is clearly defined and we deliver against it. If the scope doesn't ship as defined, we extend the engagement to deliver it, no extra charge.

The sprint isn't a fit for every brand. Under $2M revenue, you're usually better off waiting until scale. Complex multi-catalog operations or multi-channel operations are scoped under our Enterprise tier (custom pricing). Non-DTC service businesses aren't a fit. We turn brands down on the discovery call when this is true. It's what lets us actually move the number for the brands we take on.

Technical implementation ships in the sprint window (3-4 weeks). Schema and feed changes typically show measurable impact within 4-6 weeks. Authority signal work (publications, communities, reviews) typically shows in 60-90 days as citations compound. Anyone promising visibility lift in week one is overpromising.

The 30-day re-audit shows what moved early. The full picture surfaces in 60-90 days. Plan accordingly.

Everything we built is yours. The Blueprint, Kit, and Playbook are documents you keep. The schema, content, and feeds are deployed on your site. The retainer is genuinely optional. Some brands run the sprint and continue in-house from there. That's a legitimate path. The retainer is for ongoing platform monitoring, content refresh, and authority compound work.

No. The technical work (feed optimization, content quality, crawlability, and structured data where it earns its place) follows Google's own best practices and improves the same fundamentals traditional search rewards. We are specific about structured data: large-scale studies show generic schema markup does not lift AI citations, and thin schema can perform worse than none at all. We implement attribute-rich structured data where it improves how AI systems parse your products, and we skip it where it would be busywork. If you have specific high-ranking pages, we protect them during implementation.

No. Blocking Google-Extended controls whether Google can use your content to train Gemini. It doesn't take you out of AI Overviews or AI Mode. Google clarified this directly at Search Central Live Toronto in April 2026. Both AI surfaces pull from Google's standard search index, regardless of Google-Extended status. A Citation Labs study of 4 million AI citations found news publishers who blocked Google-Extended still appeared in citations 92% of the time, and 70-88% for other AI crawlers. Blocking is a policy gesture that costs you SEO traffic without actually opting you out.

No. We work from GA4 (Viewer access), Google Search Console (Restricted access), and your site's public-facing data. We deliver code your developer deploys. This keeps your store secure and gives you full control over what changes go live.

The Blueprint is the durable artifact. It's the strategic foundation that says "for your brand, these are the signals that matter most and why." When platforms change, the Blueprint's priorities don't change immediately. The tactics underneath might shift, but the strategic priorities are stable. Retainer clients get methodology updates as the system evolves. Sprint-only clients get a 90-day courtesy window where we notify you if something material changes.

Kickoff call (30 minutes), intake questionnaire (10 minutes of your time, 1-2 days for us to gather your data ourselves), week 1 audit and Blueprint build, week 2 implementation work, week 3 finalization, pre-delivery strategy call, and delivery. You're mostly hands-off after the kickoff call until the strategy call near the end. We do the work. The 30-day re-audit follows after you've had time to implement.