Summarize this article with AI
Send it straight to your assistant and get the short version first. The link travels with the prompt, so the model reads the real page.
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The short answer
Roughly two thirds of AI visibility work is good SEO. The remaining third, off-site corroboration and fact-level extractability, is the part that is actually new. A provider who cannot tell you which is which either does not know or would rather you did not ask.
The overlap, which is most of it
Everything here was good SEO in 2019 and is still good practice now. If a proposal charges you a premium for it under a new name, that is a pricing decision rather than a technical one.
- Crawlability and indexing, including robots and sitemaps[1]
- Site structure, heading hierarchy and internal linking
- Page speed and mobile rendering
- Accurate, consistent business information
- Structured data describing your organization and services[2]
- Content that answers real questions rather than targeting a keyword[3]
What is genuinely additional
Off-site corroboration
In classic SEO, third-party mentions mattered mostly as links passing authority. For an answer engine they matter as independent evidence about what you are and what you do. That is a different job, and it changes what you work on.
Fact-level extractability
SEO optimized pages. Answer engines lift individual facts. A page can rank well and still be a poor source, because its claims need three paragraphs of context to make sense.
What is being oversold
- Secret files and special schema. Google's documentation is explicit that no special markup is required to be eligible for AI features.[4]
- Separate AI traffic reporting. AI Overviews traffic is not cleanly separable in GA4. A confident AI traffic line is an estimate presented as a measurement.
- Guaranteed citation rates. Nobody can promise this, and offering it proves no baseline was taken.
- Aggressive body rewriting for machines. Controlled tests of this have come back worse rather than better, and it tends to strip the voice that made the page worth reading.
How to buy it without being taken
- Ask for the split in writing: which line items are ordinary SEO, which are new.
- Ask what they will measure before starting, and what the denominator is.
- Ask how many repetitions per query and how many engines.
- Ask what they refuse to promise. A good answer includes rankings, citation rates and lead volume.
- Ask who owns the raw records afterward. The answer should be you.
If someone cannot tell you which half of the invoice is SEO with a new name, you are not buying a method. You are buying vocabulary.Jonathan Sterritt
Questions builders actually ask
Should I stop doing SEO?
No. Most of AI visibility runs on the same foundation. Stopping SEO would remove the base the newer work sits on.
Can my current SEO agency do this?
Often yes, for the overlapping two thirds. The off-site and measurement pieces are where most agencies have no process yet. Bring them into the conversation rather than replacing them by default.
Is schema markup worth it if it is not required?
Yes. Not required for eligibility is different from not useful. Structured data lets a machine verify what your page claims, which reduces ambiguity, and ambiguity is what gets you skipped.
Sources
Every claim above that could be checked links to the primary documentation rather than to another agency blog. That is the standard we hold client content to as well.
Share this article with AI
Finished it? Hand the whole thing to a model and ask what it means for your business specifically, including anything in it you think is wrong.
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