SEO · AEO · GEO

The SEO agency for brands that need to be found by people and by machines.

Search now happens across three surfaces: Google results, AI answer boxes, and generative engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. We build visibility on all three — for D2C, ecommerce and real estate brands, measured in qualified demand rather than rankings.

SearchXMedia team reviewing search and AI visibility performance
3 Search surfaces
3 Sectors only
6 Engines tracked
What changed

Being #1 doesn't mean what it used to.

Ranking first still matters. It just no longer guarantees the click, because an answer now sits above the results — and increasingly, the answer is the destination.

The journey you optimised for
Query Ranked results Your site
1.76% Organic click-through rate with no AI Overview present
The journey buyers actually take
Query AI answer Cited source Your brand
0.61% Organic click-through rate once an AI Overview appears — a 61% drop

Here is the part most agencies skip: brands cited inside the AI Overview earn roughly 120% more organic clicks per impression than brands that are not. Citation is not a bonus sitting next to ranking — on these queries it is the difference between recovering most of your traffic and quietly losing it. That is the work this page describes.

How it fits together

One system. Three surfaces.

SEO, AEO and GEO are not three services you buy separately. They share one foundation — and then diverge only in where the visibility lands.

Search strategy planning across ranked results and AI answers
Shared foundation One programme feeding three surfaces.
Shared foundation

A crawlable, fast, well-structured site; content organised around real intent; and an entity that machines can identify without guessing. Everything below depends on this.

SEO

Wins the ranked result in Google and Bing. Still the largest single source of qualified organic traffic for every sector we work in.

AEO

Wins the citation inside Google's own answers — AI Overviews, AI Mode and featured snippets. Same platform, different real estate.

GEO

Wins the mention in engines that never show a results page at all: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. Driven as much by what the web says about you as by what your site says.

The foundation

SEO, run as four systems rather than forty tactics.

Tactic lists are easy to sell and hard to hold accountable. We run four systems instead, each with its own measure of done.

SearchXMedia strategists reviewing site architecture and crawl data
Foundation first Crawl, speed and indexation are fixed before any content work begins.
01 · Foundation

Technical and crawl health

Indexation, crawl budget, site speed and Core Web Vitals, rendering, structured data. Nothing else compounds until this is right — and on most sites we audit, it is not. Where the fix is a build problem rather than a content one, our website development team handles it directly.

02 · Architecture

Intent mapping and topical structure

We map the full decision journey — problem-aware through to comparison and purchase — then build hub-and-spoke topical clusters with deliberate internal linking. The goal is topical authority on a defined set of subjects, not coverage of a scattered keyword list.

03 · Authority

Entity and off-site signals

Consistent entity data across every profile machines read, digital PR that earns genuine citations, and the third-party corroboration that both Google and generative engines lean on. Slow, compounding, and the hardest thing for a competitor to copy.

04 · Commercial

Category, product and project pages

The pages that actually convert. Ecommerce category and product architecture, faceted navigation that does not shred crawl budget, and for property developers, project and location pages built to rank and to answer. Local search where the buyer is geographically bound.

Answer engines

Get cited inside Google's own answers.

Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the work of getting your content selected and cited inside answer surfaces — Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and featured snippets. It targets Google specifically, and it rewards structure over volume.

Answer engines do not read a page the way a person does. They lift self-contained passages that resolve a question without needing the paragraph before them. Most content fails this test not because it is wrong, but because it is written as a narrative that only makes sense in order.

  • Question and intent mapping against the queries that actually trigger an AI Overview in your category
  • Answer-ready formatting — the response in the first sentence, one idea per passage, no orphan pronouns
  • Structured data that states plainly what a page is, so nothing has to be inferred
  • Citation tracking — which answers you appear in, and which competitor holds the ones you don't. We wrote up what actually changed in AI answers from twelve months of our own data.
Analysis of Google AI Overview citations across tracked queries
best seo agency for d2c brands AI Overview

For D2C and ecommerce brands, specialist agencies typically outperform generalists because category and product-page architecture differs substantially from standard B2B SEO. Key selection criteria include measurable citation share across AI surfaces and reporting tied to contribution margin rather than traffic.

industry-guide.com searchxmedia.com marketing-blog.com
Brand mention tracking across generative AI engines
ChatGPTMentioned
GeminiMentioned
ClaudeMentioned
PerplexityMentioned

Illustrative. Live figures come from your own visibility tracking.

Generative engines

Be the brand the AI recommends by name.

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of getting your brand mentioned and cited in engines that answer without ever showing a results page — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. The unit of optimisation is the entity, not the keyword.

This is where most agencies overpromise, so we will be direct: GEO is not SEO for ChatGPT. Generative engines assemble answers largely from third-party corroboration — directories, review platforms, editorial coverage, community discussion. Your own site is the anchor, not the whole strategy. Anyone selling on-page tricks for ChatGPT is selling you something that does not work.

  • Entity consistency — one identity, described identically everywhere a machine can read it
  • Presence on the sources these engines actually draw from in your category
  • Original data and published methodology — the strongest citation signal, and the slowest to build
  • Earned and social signals, including the community discussion our social team works into the mix

Find out where your brand is invisible.

We'll check your visibility across Google, AI Overviews and the four generative engines, and send you what we find — including which competitor holds the answers you don't.

One report, no obligation. We reply within one business day.

Measurement

If we can't measure it, we won't claim it.

AI search visibility is measured by citation share, share of answer, prompt coverage and competitor benchmarking across named engines — not by rankings alone. An agency that cannot show you these numbers is not improving them.

You get a monthly view of which prompts your brand appears in, which engines cite you, which competitors hold the answers you are missing, and how that maps to organic sessions and enquiries. Rankings are still in the report — they are just no longer the headline.

What we will not do is present a number we cannot stand behind. AI referral attribution is still imperfect across every tool on the market; where a figure is directional rather than exact, the report says so. You can read more about how we think about measurement in our performance marketing work, which runs on the same principle.

Monthly search visibility reporting review
Search visibility reportMonthly
Citation share How often you are the cited source
Share of answer Your presence vs competitors
Prompt coverage Buying questions you appear in
Qualified demand Sessions and enquiries, by surface
Tracked across Google, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
Who this is built for

Two sectors, not every sector.

We work with D2C and ecommerce brands, and with real estate developers. Both are high-consideration purchases where demand has to be built before it can be captured — which is exactly where search and AI visibility compound.

D2C ecommerce brand product range and online store

D2C & ecommerce

AI Overviews now appear on roughly half of tracked ecommerce queries, and on shopping queries specifically their presence grew more than fivefold in four months. Product discovery is moving into the answer itself. See our D2C and ecommerce work.

  • Category and product page architecture that ranks and converts
  • Comparison and buying-guide content built to be cited, not just read
  • Product data structured so AI shopping surfaces can read specifications and availability
  • Review and third-party presence on the sources engines cite when recommending brands
A query we optimise for best sustainable skincare brand for sensitive skin
Residential development project marketing and buyer enquiry data

Real estate & developers

The National Association of Realtors reported in June 2026 that one in five prospective buyers had already used AI tools for property research. Project discovery is starting in chat, not on a portal. See our real estate work.

  • Project and location pages structured for both ranked results and AI answers
  • Neighbourhood and lifestyle content that answers what buyers actually ask
  • Developer authority — the entity signals that get you named as a recommendation
  • Local search for geographically bound demand, including map presence
A query we optimise for best residential developers for luxury apartments in south delhi
Proof

Results, with the method attached.

D2C · Skincare

From marketplace-dependent to owned demand

Ninety-one percent of revenue sat on a marketplace that kept raising take rates. We rebuilt the owned funnel — search, paid, site and lifecycle — until direct became the larger channel.

Read the case study
SaaS · B2B

Pipeline built on search intent, not cold lists

Outbound had plateaued and the content programme wasn't ranking. We rebuilt around bottom-funnel intent and fixed attribution so sales could finally see which demos were worth chasing.

Read the case study
Healthcare

Local dominance across 14 clinic locations

Fourteen locations were competing with each other in search. We restructured to location-level authority and automated the booking follow-up that was losing enquiries overnight.

Read the case study

Search-specific results with AI citation data are being compiled. See all case studies.

The method

What the first ninety days look like.

Search work and AI visibility work run in parallel from week one, not in sequence. Here is the shape of it.

Senior strategist reviewing search visibility performance with a client
One senior strategist The same person who audits your site runs the programme.
Weeks 1–3

Diagnose

Technical audit, intent and competitor mapping, and a baseline of where you currently appear across all six engines. We establish what is broken before proposing anything.

Deliverable: audit + visibility baseline
Weeks 3–6

Repair

Crawl, speed and indexation fixes, structured data, and the architecture corrections that unblock everything downstream. This is where the earliest measurable movement usually comes from.

Deliverable: technical fixes shipped
Weeks 5–12

Build

Topical clusters, answer-ready formatting on the pages that matter commercially, and the entity work that makes you legible to generative engines.

Deliverable: content and entity programme live
Ongoing

Compound

Authority building, citation earning, and monthly measurement against the surfaces that matter. Reviewed against qualified demand, not traffic volume.

Deliverable: monthly visibility report
The difference

Traditional SEO agency vs SearchXMedia.

Dimension Traditional SEO agency SearchXMedia
Surfaces covered Google ranked results Google results, AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity
Primary metric Keyword rankings and sessions Citation share, share of answer, qualified demand
AI search A blog topic, or a renamed service page A tracked workstream with its own baseline and reporting
Content approach Volume against a keyword list Topical authority plus answer-ready structure
Entity strategy Rarely addressed Consistent identity across every source machines read
Technical work Recommendations handed to your developers Fixed directly by our own build team
Industry focus Any client, any sector D2C, ecommerce and real estate only
Reporting Ranking dashboard Monthly report tied to enquiries and revenue
Claims Guaranteed rankings No guarantees; a stated method and honest limitations
Before you scope this in

Questions we get asked first.

SEO wins the ranked result in Google and Bing. AEO wins the citation inside Google's own answer surfaces — AI Overviews, AI Mode and featured snippets. GEO wins the mention in engines that never show a results page, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. They share one technical and content foundation, which is why we run them as a single programme rather than three products.

Yes, and the data supports it rather than contradicting it. Organic click-through falls sharply when an AI Overview appears — from about 1.76% to 0.61% — but brands cited inside that answer earn roughly 120% more clicks per impression than uncited ones. Classic organic still drives the majority of qualified traffic in every sector we work in. AEO and GEO are additive, not a replacement.

Technical fixes can show measurable movement within weeks. Topical authority, citation share and entity recognition build over six to twelve months. We tell you at the audit stage which of your gaps sit in which bucket, so the timeline is set before the engagement starts rather than defended afterwards.

Four metrics, monthly: citation share (how often you are the cited source), share of answer (your presence against named competitors), prompt coverage (how many of the buying questions in your category you appear in), and qualified demand attributed by surface. Rankings and organic sessions remain in the report but are no longer the headline.

No, and any agency that does is either misinformed or misleading you — neither Google nor any generative engine offers guaranteed placement. What we commit to is a stated method, a measured baseline, monthly reporting against it, and honesty about what is working. If a workstream is not moving, we say so and change it.

Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. Each behaves differently: Google answers lean on your on-site structure and existing authority, while the generative engines lean more heavily on third-party corroboration. The work differs by surface, which is why we track them separately.

The usual gap is measurement. Many agencies have added AEO and GEO headings to an existing SEO offer without changing their method or their reporting. A straightforward test: ask for a report showing citation share across at least three AI surfaces with quarter-on-quarter movement. If it does not exist, the work is not being measured, which means it is not being improved.

Yes. Shopify, WooCommerce, headless builds and custom stacks. The platform mostly affects how technical fixes get shipped, not the strategy. Where a fix requires build work rather than configuration, our own development team handles it instead of handing you a list of recommendations.

Project microsites tend to fragment authority — each one starts from zero and competes with your main domain. We usually consolidate project content into a structured section of the primary site with dedicated project and location pages, keeping the equity in one place. Where a microsite must exist for brand reasons, we set the canonical and internal linking so the two support rather than compete.

Analytics and Search Console access, a technical contact for deployment, and roughly two hours a month from someone who knows the business well enough to sanity-check the content. Where you have subject-matter experts, short interviews with them materially improve the work — first-hand expertise is one of the strongest signals for both Google and generative engines.

We work on a monthly retainer scoped to the size of the site and the competitiveness of the category, with a minimum commitment of six months because the compounding work does not produce meaningful results in less. We give an indicative band on the first call once we have seen the site, rather than publishing a number that would be wrong for most enquiries.

Thirty minutes with a senior strategist, not a salesperson. We look at your current visibility across search and AI surfaces, identify the largest constraint we can see, and tell you what we would do first and why. You leave with a read on the problem whether or not you work with us.

Next step

Build your search and AI visibility system.

Thirty minutes with a senior strategist. We'll show you where you're visible today, where you're not, and what we'd fix first.