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Your rankings have not moved. Your traffic has. Nobody has explained why, and the explanation arrived on your last invoice as a line item you did not ask for.
My SEO agency is trying to charge me extra for ai search they say it will get me seen in chat gpt. Is it worth it? I pay them 1200 and they want an extra 300 for ai visibility. I do get more through my website now but feel like it's not as much as it should be.
A UK business owner, r/smallbusinessuk, March 2026
That is how most people in the UK meet this subject. Not as a discipline, as a price. So it is worth knowing what the words behind the price mean before deciding whether the price is fair.
What is generative engine optimisation, plainly? It is the work of being one of the sources an AI answer is assembled from.
If you want who does this kind of work and what it costs, that is a separate page. This one is the definition.
Why your clicks fell while your rankings held
A search result used to be a doorway. You ranked, somebody clicked, you got a visitor. The ranking and the visit were near enough the same event, so reporting one told you about the other.
They have come apart. In the first four months of 2026, 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click, on SparkToro's reading of a US clickstream panel. The UK evidence below points the same way.
Part of that is Google answering the question itself. Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report puts it at about 30% of searches now showing AI overviews, with more than half of adults saying they see these summaries often.
Part of it is the question never reaching a search engine at all. The same Ofcom report counts 1.8 billion UK visits to ChatGPT in the first eight months of 2025, up from 368 million a year earlier.
None of this means search is finished. Google Search is still used by 82% of UK adults, and the competition regulator records that more than 90% of searches in the UK take place on Google.
What changed is the payoff for arriving. Ranking well now sometimes means being read aloud to somebody who never sees your name.
What generative engine optimisation actually is
An assistant does not choose between ten links. It reads several pages, decides which of them it can rely on, and assembles one answer, naming a few of its sources on the way.
So the target moved. The job is no longer to be a result worth clicking, it is to be a passage worth quoting.
In practice that comes down to a few plain things, none of them exotic. Say what you mean early, be specific enough to be checked, and be legible to a machine before you are charming to a person.
- Answer the question in the first paragraph, then explain. A page that warms up for 400 words has nothing quotable at the top of it.
- Attach a number, a date or a name to every claim. A sentence nobody can check is a sentence a careful system will not repeat.
- Keep the page readable as data as well as prose: honest headings, clean markup, a structure that says what each part is. That is a job for whoever looks after the site itself.
- Describe the business the same way everywhere it appears, so the same entity is recognised each time.
Software will offer to do some of this for you, and parts of it genuinely can be measured. What those tools can and cannot see is its own subject, covered in our look at the AI SEO tools people reach for first.
GEO, and what people actually type
The naming is a mess and it is worth saying so. GEO, AEO, answer engine optimisation, AI search optimisation and LLM optimisation are all in circulation. So is the search itself: what is AI SEO called now is a question people put to Google directly.
They describe roughly the same work with different edges. Nobody has won that argument yet, and anyone telling you the terms are precisely defined is describing a market that does not exist.
How it differs from SEO, and where it does not
This is the part sellers are least keen to be plain about, so here is the plain version. Most of generative engine optimisation is ordinary search work aimed at a different reader.
From my understanding, SEO and AEO aren't too dissimilar. Both require good site structure, customer-centric pages, and trusted backlinks. If your agency is doing these things for your SEO then there's a good chance that they'll also be picked up for AI search. In short, I'd keep your investment where it is.
A UK commenter, r/smallbusinessuk, March 2026
The same work, judged by a stricter reader
| The work | What it did for search | What it does for an answer engine |
|---|---|---|
| Site structure and markup | Helped a crawler index the page | Helps a model tell a claim from a caption |
| Pages written round real questions | Matched the query, won the click | Supplies the passage the answer is lifted from |
| Being cited elsewhere | Counted as a ranking signal | Counted as a reason to trust you at all |
| Clear, checkable claims | Read as quality by a person | Read as safe to repeat by a machine |
Nothing in the first column is retired. The second column is the same work being judged again by a stricter reader.
Which is why an add-on priced as a new discipline deserves a question. If the organic work underneath it is being done properly, a good deal of this is already paid for.
What is genuinely new is smaller than the pitch, and real. Answering before explaining, being specific enough to be quoted, and being recognised as one consistent business rather than three near-matches.
So read it as a change of emphasis inside the search work you already buy, rather than as a second invoice for a second thing.
What nobody can promise you
There is no position to check. An answer is generated for one person in one session, and asking the same question twice can produce two different sets of sources.
That has two consequences worth carrying into any sales conversation. Nobody can guarantee you a citation, and nobody can show you a ranking report for one either.
A seller who answers those plainly is worth listening to. One who answers with a visibility score and no method is selling a dashboard.
If a second reading of the quote in front of you would help, ask us whether your pages are citable at all. It is a short answer either way, and it does not need to become a project.
The honest summary is that this is search work with a shorter fuse on vagueness. The rest of what we do is judged on the same terms, and the pages that answer first are the ones that keep earning.