Reviews, profiles, and third-party proof now belong in the visibility strategy. What’s your AIO strategy? Is it working? If your clients are asking, you need answers and most agencies don’t have them yet.
AI Optimization is the work of improving how a brand is found, understood, and recommended in AI-driven search experiences. Good SEO habits remain the foundation of that work: a technically sound website, useful content, accurate local data, and strong classic search visibility. But even in its early stages, AIO is mission-critical to discovery with a distinct discipline requiring expert deployment.
Treating AIO as a narrow SEO add-on risks leaving much of their clients’ AI visibility unmanaged. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT derive recommendations from a company’s website as well as its wider public record: online reviews, map profiles, industry coverage, partner sites, and customer conversations. That makes AIO an agency-wide visibility challenge that combines the technical discipline of SEO with the consistency, reputation, and third-party validation that brand management has always valued.
A fragmented consumer journey drives the stakes even higher. Pew Research Center found that 42% of all U.S. adults are using AI chatbots to search the web. As more consumers use AI to research companies and make decisions, agencies need a strategy for addressing how those systems encounter and evaluate their clients’ products and services.
AI is checking your referrals
An AI-generated answer draws from a wide range of sources to determine whether a business is credible, relevant, and aligned with the user’s needs. A matching phrase on a corporate web site will introduce that company to the chatbot, but consistency and expertise across the wider web shape whether that introduction holds up.
That changes how agencies and business owners should think about visibility. Page rankings for keywords remain important, but brands also need to prepare for what AI finds when it compiles evidence about their products and reputation from across industry publications, integration partners, and peer communities, i.e., sources outside your control and sometimes direct sightline.
Semify’s recent AIO testing demonstrates the importance of a holistic approach to discovery. In our first phase, we blended external linking and onsite content to achieve 12-17% increases in visibility in LLMs within 6 weeks. Building on that momentum, we expanded prompts resulting in a +57% in visibility in Google AI Overviews over an additional 12 weeks, compared to half that with SEO alone. The takeaway is SEO and AIO work better in tandem. Together they capture different forms of visibility, and the gap shows that traditional rank and AI visibility require related yet distinct strategies.
The source mix gives further weight to the referral analogy. In Semify’s 30-day sample of Google AI Overview citation URLs, 6.7% came from Reddit, Quora, Facebook, or Yelp — roughly one in every fifteen sources. Customer experience and public discussion have always mattered to agencies and the brands they manage. AI-driven discovery gives those signals another path to influence whether a company is recommended.
The shared work of brand management and AIO
AIO experts are always aiming at a moving target. They monitor and identify the prompts that matter to potential customers, track the constantly changing and fluctuating sources used by the LLMs to answer those questions, and solve for the technical or informational gaps that limit visibility. Their work gains depth when it includes the evidence brand teams, customer teams, PR teams, and local-marketing teams are already creating.
AIO connects work that is often handled in separate client engagements: technical SEO, content, digital PR, reputation, local marketing, and brand strategy. Few agencies have built all of these capabilities in-house, which is why many now partner with dedicated AIO specialists to run and interpret this work across their full client or customer base.
The growth opportunities for agencies and their clients begins when the teams align. Does the company’s website describe the same strengths that customers mention in reviews? Are its profiles accurate across the places customers search? Does the business show up in the publications, communities, and expert conversations that influence its buyers? Does the company have enough independent proof to support the story it is telling?
These questions give agencies and brand management a shared agenda. Brand teams help ensure the company is represented consistently, while the agencies managing AIO on behalf of their clients identify where that representation affects AI-driven discovery. Together, they can turn a fragmented set of signals into a consistent and more credible public record.
Building a brand AI can understand
SEO alone won’t win the AIO battle, but abandoning it will rack up the losses just as fast. Technical SEO makes a company’s services, expertise, and value accessible to search engines and AI-driven discovery systems. Local SEO keeps public business information accurate across the places customers search.
AI visibility expands the context around that work. It connects a company’s owned record with the credibility it earns through customers, partners, publications, and industry communities.
Successful AIO begins by understanding the signals that shape AI-driven discovery and strengthening the ones a company can influence. Across dozens or hundreds of client accounts, agencies can identify patterns that a single brand’s analytics may miss and turn those insights into repeatable action. For agencies without a dedicated practice, a white-label AIO SEO partner can provide the expertise, insight, and operating model needed to manage that work at scale.
