AI didn't break search. It finally started rewarding the businesses that did it right.
Search engine optimization, answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization are one job, not three. We help your business get found in search, chosen as the answer and cited by AI chatbots, using the framework in our free living book.
What the acronyms mean, and why they belong together.
Getting your pages indexed and ranked, so search engines can find your business at all.
Shaping your content so it can be lifted as the direct answer: in a featured result, a voice search or an AI Overview.
Earning a place in the answers AI chatbots write, as a source they cite and describe accurately.
AI answer engines are built on top of search, not instead of it. Traditional SEO is not obsolete. It is the prerequisite. What died was the shortcut. Not the craft.
The answer layer sits on top of the rankings.
Fewer people click through, and the ones who arrive from an AI answer are worth more. Both point the same way: be the source the answer is built from.
of Google AI Overviews cite at least one source from the top 20 organic results.
drop in organic click-through on searches where an AI Overview appears.
the value of a visitor from AI search, compared with one from traditional organic search.
prompts a day sent to ChatGPT, on top of the searches people still run on Google.
We build all three layers of search visibility.
The book's architecture, as a service. Each layer depends on the one below it, so we start where your business is losing ground.
Foundation
Traditional SEO: indexation, rankings and quality. It gets you into the pool the AI retrieves from. Skip it and you are invisible.
Consensus
Third-party presence: reviews, directories, video, forums and the press. It earns the trust that gets you cited. Skip it and you are retrieved but not cited.
Delivery
Technical delivery: schema, semantic structure and clean parsing. It makes sure the AI represents you accurately. Skip it and you are cited but misrepresented.
The CMO's Guide to AI Search Discovery
Our approach comes from this book by Evodio "Vo" Walle, the chamber's President and CEO, who has spent twenty years in search. It is free, every statistic in it is sourced and dated, and it is rewritten as the platforms move. Subscribers get each new edition automatically.
Three steps to see where you stand.
We look where your customers look
How Google, AI Overviews, ChatGPT and other AI chatbots describe your business today, in English and in Spanish.
We map the gaps by layer
Foundation, consensus or delivery: you see which layer is holding you back, and what fixing it involves.
We fix what pays off first
Starting with the work most likely to move rankings and citations, and measuring the visits AI answers send as we go.
Members start a step ahead. Every membership includes a directory profile on sfbayhcc.com that search engines index: one more trusted source describing your business.
Compare membership levelsFind out what AI says about your business.
Send us your website and we will show you how search engines and AI chatbots see it today. Se habla español.
