Research from Brandlight found the overlap between the top Google links and the sources AI assistants actually cite has dropped from around 70% to under 20%. Read that again. You can hold position one on Google and still be absent the moment a customer asks ChatGPT or Gemini who to hire.
The academic side backs it up. The Princeton-led study that gave this discipline its name measured up to 40% more visibility in generated answers from a specific set of changes, with adding quotations and adding statistics the two strongest single moves.
None of that replaces ordinary SEO. It sits on top of it, and it rewards being genuinely quotable rather than being keyword-dense.
LocalBusiness, Service, Person, FAQPage, Offer and BreadcrumbList in JSON-LD. Google's own guidance says it is not required for AI answers, and a causal study of 1,885 pages found no lift from adding it alone. I do it because it is what Bing and the assistants parse. I will not quote you the threefold figure the agencies do.
Each page opens with the direct answer to the question it targets, then the evidence. Good for readers, and it is the shape assistants can lift from.
Your own data, your own prices, named clients. Statistics and quotations are the two changes with the strongest measured effect, and they have to be real.
Categories, services, photos, posts, and replies to reviews. Vendor studies put this and reviews above on-page work, links and citations combined.
Many sites block the crawlers they want to be read by. Cloudflare now blocks AI bots by default. I check logs for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot.
Rankings, yes, but also which assistants name you, for which questions, and how that changed. Monthly, one page, no dashboard login.
I will add one if you want it, and it takes an hour. But Google has said on the record it does not support the format, and one study of over 500 million AI bot visits found 408 requests for the file across ninety days. Anyone billing it as an AI-ranking service is selling you a text file.
Programmatic town pages worked brilliantly until they did not. Google now demotes duplicate and thin location pages harder than at any point before 2026. One auditor deleted 34 of them and the surviving pages climbed four positions in two months. I build three or four real ones, with actual proof on each.
Technical changes can show inside a fortnight. Local pack movement and AI citations take two to four months, sometimes longer in a competitive town. Anyone promising faster is guessing.
Possibly more than someone who does not, because you have further to fall. If your current traffic comes from Google alone, you are exposed to a channel that is shrinking in clicks even where it holds in rankings.
No, and neither can anyone else. What I will commit to is the work being done and reported, and telling you when something is not working.
Look at whether their reports mention structured data, entity consistency and AI citations at all. If it is a monthly ranking spreadsheet and a couple of blog posts, then yes, it is different.
A great deal. Reviews feed both local rankings and how trustworthy an assistant judges you to be. One source claims a threshold of around 150 reviews before AI tools reliably name a business, though I have only seen that figure in one place and would not build a plan on the exact number.
Real numbers from your device and connection, not a screenshot of a score I chose. Nothing is sent anywhere. The measurement happens in your browser and stays there. If one of these ever reads amber on my own site, you will see it, which is rather the point. I audit these for £650.