If there’s a better use of your budget, I’ll tell you.
AI search optimization services
GetfoundinAIsearch
Your next buyer will ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google’s AI Mode who to trust. The answer takes a few seconds. If your name isn’t in it, you lose the deal and never hear it happened.
I get brands named, recommended, and cited in AI answers, then tie that visibility to pipeline and revenue. You work with me directly, from the first audit to the monthly report.
51%of B2B software buyers now start research in an AI chatbot more often than in GoogleG2, 2026
69%of those buyers picked a different vendor than planned because of what AI told themG2, 2026
Searchdidn’tdie,buttheshortlistmoved
For twenty years, buying started on a page of ten blue links. You fought for a spot on page one (nobody has ever willingly visited page two), and the buyer did the comparing.
AI now does the comparing for them. ChatGPT passed a billion weekly users in August 2026. Google’s AI Mode passed a billion monthly users in May 2026, a year after launch. Buyers ask for a shortlist and get one, with reasons attached.
The number
What it means
Source
94%
of B2B buyers use generative AI while they buy, and twice as many as the year before now rank it above every other source, including vendor websites and sales reps
Fewer clicks reach your site. More of the decision happens before anyone visits. And a third of buyers will happily choose a company they had never heard of, as long as AI vouches for it.
That last number cuts both ways. It’s how a smaller brand gets past a bigger one, and it’s how an established brand gets replaced without ever seeing it happen.
Most leaders I talk to know this is happening. Fewer know whether their SEO already covers it. It usually doesn’t.
Theupside:AIbuyersshowupready
AI still sends a small share of traffic. The visitors it does send are further along.
Retail
AI traffic to US retail sites grew 393% year over year in early 2026, and it converted 42% better than other traffic in March. Adobe Analytics, 1 trillion+ visits
Publishers and subscriptions
AI referrals made up under 1% of traffic across 1,200+ sites, but converted to sign-ups at roughly three times the rate of search. Microsoft Clarity, 2025
Google itself
Brands cited inside an AI Overview earned 35% more organic clicks than brands left out on the same queries. Seer Interactive, 2025
Trust
85% of B2B software buyers think more highly of a vendor when an AI chatbot recommends it. G2, 2026
Being early is also cheaper. Ahrefs found in 2025 that brands in the top quarter for web mentions get more than ten times as many AI Overview mentions as the next group down. AI keeps recommending the brands it already recommends, and that gap gets harder to close every quarter you wait.
Plenty of companies rank well in Google and barely exist in AI answers.
The reasons are specific, and most of them sit outside a normal SEO retainer.
AI trusts mentions more than links. In Ahrefs’ study of 75,000 brands, branded web mentions tracked AI Overview visibility about three times more closely than backlinks did (0.664 vs 0.218 correlation).
AI borrows other people’s opinions. When someone asks for the best option, answers lean on review sites, comparison articles, directories, YouTube, and forum threads. If you’re missing there, you’re usually missing from the answer.
One prompt becomes many searches. AI tools split a question into sub-questions and pull a passage for each. A page that saves its answer for paragraph nine is writing a mystery novel, and AI doesn’t read to the end.
Some crawlers see less than Google does. Several AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript. If your key content loads through scripts, they see a nearly empty page. An empty page doesn’t persuade anyone.
Old facts never retire. AI will quote your 2021 pricing, a service you dropped, or a competitor’s description of you until something better replaces it. It’s loyal like that.
AIvisibilityisitsownscoreboard,splitintwo
Mentioned
Cited
The question
Does AI know you exist and recommend you for your category?
Does AI trust your pages enough to use them as a source?
What moves it
How often trusted third-party sources name you, and how clearly the web agrees on what you do
Pages that answer the question directly, that AI crawlers can reach, and that are the best source on the topic
Most brands fail at least one without knowing it. So the work starts by finding out which, and then fixes them in order of what’s costing you the most.
Weeks 1 to 3
First: what does AI say about you today?
Think of it as a credit check, for your reputation with machines. I run the prompts your buyers actually use through ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, and check Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Every prompt runs several times, because AI rarely gives the same answer twice.
On my desk
Buyer prompt research
ChatGPT visibility analysis
AI Overview and AI Mode tracking
Competitor share of voice
Citation source analysis
A check on what AI gets wrong about you
Query fan-out mapping
Keyword and funnel mapping
On your desk
A baseline of how often each assistant names you, next to your top three competitors
The sources AI cites for your category, and the ones you’re missing from
A prompt map ranked by how close each prompt sits to a purchase
A 90-day plan ranked by revenue, not by how interesting the problem is
Weeks 2 to 6
Can AI read you?
If the crawlers can’t get in, nothing else on this page matters. I check the rules that let GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot through your robots.txt and firewall, make sure key pages work without JavaScript, and confirm you’re indexed properly in Bing as well as Google, since some assistants lean on Bing.
About llms.txt: I’ll add one if you want it. I won’t bill you for it as if it were magic, because the evidence that it changes citations is thin. The llms.txt guide shows who actually reads the file.
On my desk
AI crawler audit (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot)
Robots.txt and firewall rules
JavaScript rendering checks
Google and Bing indexing
llms.txt, agents.md
On your desk
Key pages that AI crawlers can read in full, without JavaScript
Confirmed access for every assistant your buyers use
Weeks 2 to 8
Does AI know who you are?
If your site says one thing, your LinkedIn says another, and a 2019 directory listing says a third, AI does what anyone would. It picks one and hopes.
Entity SEO fixes that. One consistent description of who you are, what you sell, and who it’s for, carried through your About and author pages, schema markup, and the profiles and listings AI already reads.
One consistent description of your company across your site and your main profiles
Schema that matches what you sell
Ongoing
Can AI quote you?
AI quotes passages. Whole pages rarely make it into an answer, so every commercial page gets rewritten to answer the buying question in its first lines, in sentences that still make sense when pulled out on their own.
Pages that already have standing get updated first, because they’re closer to paying off. Then I fill the gaps: comparison and “vs” pages, alternatives pages, and use-case pages for the prompts nobody on your site answers yet. Original data and real proof go in wherever you have them, since AI prefers a source that knows something others don’t.
On my desk
Commercial page rewrites
Answer-first formatting
Comparison and “vs” pages
Alternatives and use-case pages
FAQ blocks
Internal linking
Content refreshes
On your desk
Commercial pages that answer the buying question in the first lines
Comparison, alternatives, and best-for pages for the prompts buyers use to decide
Passages that still make sense when an AI lifts them out of the page
Ongoing
Does anyone vouch for you?
AI is a cautious dinner guest. It trusts you more once someone else has said nice things about you.
I map the review sites, directories, roundups, YouTube videos, Reddit threads, and Wikipedia pages that shape answers in your category. (For the record: I’m not a PR agency, and I won’t pretend otherwise.)
On my desk
Citation source mapping
Review platform profiles
Directory and listing claims
Roundup and listicle gap analysis
YouTube and Reddit presence review
On your desk
A ranked list of the sources AI cites for your buying prompts, and where you’re missing
Claimed and corrected profiles on the platforms that matter most
A plan for earning mentions on the rest, with a named owner for each
Howyou’llknowit’sworking
Every month you see both scoreboards side by side with leads and revenue.
Share of AI answers
Your share of AI answers on each platform, against competitors, month over month.
AI referral traffic
AI referral traffic tracked as its own channel in GA4, with the conversions it produced.
How they heard about you
A “how did you hear about us” field on your forms that names the AI tools, because plenty of buyers read the answer and never click.
Next month’s changes
A short list of next month’s changes, and why.
Some of this will always be estimated. AI answers vary and most platforms share little impression data. I’ll tell you which numbers are solid and which are directional, and I won’t frame a screenshot and call it a strategy.
AnAISEOstrategybuiltaroundBOFUprompts
Showing up for “what is a CDP” is nice for the ego and rarely for the invoice. Those informational answers now get delivered in full inside the assistant, so I count them as awareness and measure them that way.
The prompts that produce revenue are the ones buyers use to build a shortlist. I start with the prompts closest to a purchase and work outward.
Ten buyers asking a shortlist question are worth more than ten thousand people asking for a definition.
Prompts that build a shortlist
Best [product] for [use case]
[Your brand] vs [competitor]
Alternatives to [competitor]
Who should I hire for [service] in [city]
Resultsworthputtinganamebeside
Different markets, same standard. SEO should make you money, and these did.
Longevity and diagnostics
Jinfiniti Precision Medicine
356 to 9,365 first-page keywords
A founder’s peer-reviewed research, made legible to Google. Monthly organic sessions rose from 5,600 to 78,000.
Chateau Mojo is my SEO and AI search consultancy. I’m Jeremy McWilliams.
I’ve spent 12 years in SEO, including time at an award-winning Montreal agency. My work covers ecommerce, health and wellness, biotech, B2B, and other markets where buyers research hard before they commit.
Most AI SEO companies hand you to an account manager after the sales call. Here, the person on the call is the person doing the work.
AI search optimization services help a company get named, recommended, and cited when people ask AI assistants about its category. The work covers what AI can read on your site, what the rest of the web says about you, and whether any of it turns into business.
What is AI SEO called? AEO, GEO, and LLM SEO explained
They’re overlapping names for the same job, with a different emphasis.
Name
What it usually means
Where I cover it
Answer engine optimization (AEO)
Being the direct answer to a question, in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and assistants
Yes. Google still sends most qualified search traffic, and AI assistants pull heavily from pages search engines already trust. What changed is that SEO alone no longer covers every place buyers decide. I treat AI search as a second scoreboard that sits next to it.
How long does AI search optimization take to work?
Answers that pull live from the web, like Perplexity, ChatGPT search, and Google’s AI Overviews, can reflect changes within weeks of a page being recrawled. What a model “knows” about you from its training data moves more slowly, as new model versions ship. Before you sign, I’ll tell you which parts I expect to move first.
How much do AI SEO services cost?
Engagements run on a monthly retainer. The AI Visibility Audit is free for businesses that fit. You get the scope and the monthly fee in writing before you commit.
Can you guarantee my brand will appear in ChatGPT?
No. Nobody controls what an AI assistant says, and anyone who promises a fixed placement is guessing with great confidence. I can measure where you stand today, fix what’s in your control, and report what changed.
Which AI platforms do you cover?
ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode. If your buyers lean on another tool, like Copilot, I add it to the tracking.
Can AI do SEO on its own?
Not well. It’s a brilliant intern with no idea what your business sells. I use AI tools for research, data pulls, and repetitive checks. Deciding which prompts matter, what to say, and what to cut still needs someone who knows your market. The strategy and everything you read are mine.
What AI search optimization tools do you use?
DataForSEO’s AI optimization data for live prompt tracking across assistants, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for search data, and GA4 for AI referral traffic and conversions. The tools are the easy part. Reading them without getting excited about the wrong number is the job.
How do I choose an AI SEO agency?
Ask four questions. Do they measure mentions and citations separately? How do they handle answers changing from run to run? Who does the work after the sales call? And can they connect AI visibility to leads, or only to screenshots? The best AI SEO agency for you will have clear answers to all four.
FindoutwhatAIsaysaboutyou
Bring me your site and the three competitors you lose to most. You’ll leave the call knowing how often AI names you, who it names instead, and whether I’m the right person to change that.
