AI Search Optimization
Get found across search and AI answers
People don't only search Google anymore. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI overviews, and those answers cite some businesses and skip others. We work on both: traditional search and AI answer engines, so your brand and its information are the ones that get surfaced.
What it is
One capability, not five acronyms
Search used to mean ranking on Google. Now a lot of discovery happens inside AI assistants that read the web, form an answer, and cite a handful of sources. You'll see this called SEO, AEO, GEO, or AIO. We treat it as one job: making your brand and its information easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to cite, whether the reader is a person, a search crawler, or an AI assistant.
That means the traditional work still gets done: crawlable pages, fast load times, clean structure. On top of it, we build the clarity that AI answer engines depend on, so you're in the answer instead of left out of it.
What this looks like
What we work on
The mix depends on where your gaps are, and the assessment is where we find them. In practice the work falls into four areas.
A crawlable foundation
Fast pages, clean URLs, a real sitemap, and structured data on every page. If a search engine or an AI crawler can't read your site cleanly, nothing else matters.
Clear entities and authority
Make it unambiguous who you are, what you do, and how your pages relate, through consistent facts and connected structured data an engine can trust.
Content built to answer
Pages that lead with a direct answer to a real question, structured so a search engine or an AI assistant can lift it cleanly and hand it to the person asking.
Visibility in AI answers
The signals that help AI answer engines find, understand, and cite you: a readable llms.txt, retrieval-friendly structure, and facts that stay consistent everywhere.
Proof of the work
This site is built the way we'd build yours
The site you're reading runs on the same approach. Every page ships valid structured data and connects to one entity graph, the whole thing is static and fast, and there's a plain-language llms.txt at the root that tells AI systems what Meridian does. It's the clearest way we can show the work: our own visibility is the product.
Where it fits, this pairs with AI marketing on the broader marketing operations, and with AI strategy so you invest in the search work that's actually worth it. The services overview shows how it all connects.
Start free
Get your AI Visibility Score
Before a conversation, see where you stand. Enter your website for a free AI Visibility Score: whether ChatGPT and Perplexity would recommend you or a competitor, and the three fixes that move your score most. The score is free and needs no signup.
Ready when you are
See where your visibility is leaking
Start with the Free AI Opportunity Assessment. We look at how your site reads to search engines and AI assistants today, and give you a straight answer on what's worth fixing first.
Common questions
- What's the difference between SEO, AEO, GEO, and AIO?
- They're names for the same goal at different stages of how search has changed. SEO is being found in traditional search results. AEO (answer engine optimization), GEO (generative engine optimization), and AIO (AI optimization) are about being surfaced and cited by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI overviews. We treat them as one job, not five separate services, because the work underneath them overlaps.
- Can you guarantee I show up in ChatGPT or at the top of Google?
- No, and be wary of anyone who does. Nobody controls how Google ranks or which sources an AI assistant cites. What we can do is build the structure, clarity, and signals that make you far more likely to surface, then measure what happens and keep improving it. We'd rather set a real expectation than sell you a promise we can't keep.
- I already do SEO. Do I need this?
- Traditional SEO still matters, and it's part of this. What's changed is that AI assistants pull answers differently from a ranked list of links. They lean on clear structure, consistent facts about who you are, and content they can lift and attribute. If your SEO was built only for the old model, there's usually a gap worth closing.
- How do you actually get a site cited by AI answer engines?
- There's no trick to it. Clean, fast, crawlable pages; structured data that connects your entities; content that answers real questions directly; and a plain-language llms.txt that tells AI systems what you do. It's the same thing that makes a site clear to a person, marked up so a machine reads it the same way. We don't game either one.