"AI SEO" gets used loosely enough that most business owners aren't sure if it's a real discipline or just a rebrand of regular SEO. It's real, and it matters - but it's also less of a departure from traditional SEO than the term suggests. Here's what it actually covers.
AI SEO as an umbrella term
"AI SEO" is best understood as an umbrella covering the work of getting found, trusted, and recommended by AI-powered discovery tools - ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and traditional Google search results that are themselves increasingly shaped by AI ranking systems. It overlaps heavily with two more specific terms you'll also see: AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization). In practice, most agencies - including us - use all three somewhat interchangeably, since the underlying work is largely the same.
What's the same as traditional SEO
The foundation doesn't change: a technically sound site Google (and AI crawlers) can actually access, clear and genuinely useful content, and real local credibility signals like consistent citations and reviews. Our complete SEO guide covers this foundation in full, and none of it becomes optional just because AI search is growing - if anything, AI tools are even less forgiving of a confusing or thin site than a human skimming search results, since there's no context to fill the gaps.
What's genuinely different
Three things separate AI SEO from the traditional playbook:
- Direct-answer content. AI tools favor content that states a clear, quotable answer to a specific question rather than content that requires the reader to piece an answer together themselves.
- Structured data as a first-class requirement. Schema markup (LocalBusiness, FAQPage, Review) isn't just a minor technical nice-to-have anymore - it's a primary way AI systems extract accurate facts about your business.
- Multi-platform trust signals. Where traditional local SEO leans heavily on your Google Business Profile specifically, AI tools tend to cross-reference multiple independent sources - your site, several review platforms, and citations - before confidently naming you.
Where London businesses currently stand
Most London businesses haven't done any AI-specific optimization yet, which means the bar to stand out is currently low - a business that gets its structured data, direct-answer content, and multi-platform reviews in order now has a real first-mover advantage before this becomes standard practice across the local market, the same way basic SEO was a differentiator a decade ago and is now simply expected.
Getting started
You don't need to treat AI SEO as a separate project from your regular SEO work - it's an extension of it. Our AI search optimization service builds this layer on top of the technical and local foundation described above, and a free SEO audit checks both at once so you're not maintaining two separate strategies.