What is AI SEO?
AI SEO is the practice of making a website discoverable, understandable, and citable by AI-powered search and answer engines — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI-driven results — rather than only ranking in a traditional list of links.
It sits above two more specific disciplines: Answer Engine Optimization (structuring content so an AI can extract a direct answer) and Generative Engine Optimization (making content credible and quotable enough that a generative model chooses to cite it). AI SEO doesn't replace traditional SEO — crawlability, page speed, and clean site structure still matter — it adds a second question on top of "do I rank": will an AI system trust this page enough to mention or cite it.
Because AI-generated answers replace a ranked list with a single synthesized response, AI SEO is measured differently too — through AI mentions, prompt coverage, and citations rather than keyword-by-keyword position.
