Found by Google, cited by AI
Technical SEO, structured data and performance tuning that make you visible where customers actually search now — classic engines and AI answers alike. SEO performance and web traffic optimization are among the skills our Upwork clients endorse most.
SEO vs AEO — same goal, new rules
Answer Engine Optimization is not a buzzword replacing SEO — it is the second half of the same job. Here is how the rules differ.
Classic search (SEO)
AI answers (AEO)
How you are found
Crawled, indexed and ranked on a results page
Ingested, understood and quoted inside the answer itself
What wins
Relevance, authority, backlinks
Clear structure, direct answers, machine-readable facts
Content shape
Pages targeting keywords
Sections that answer one question completely
Technical layer
Sitemaps, canonical tags, Core Web Vitals
Structured data, clean semantics, consistent entity info
The prize
The click
The citation — being the source the AI names
What the data actually says about AI search
We sell this service, so we want you to read the sources before you buy it — Pew, Ahrefs, Semrush and Google’s own documentation. Including the findings that make our job harder.
Clicks really are collapsing
When a Google results page shows an AI summary, users click a traditional result on 8% of visits versus 15% without one (Pew, 68,879 real searches). Ahrefs measures a 58% click-through drop on the #1 result under an AI Overview. This is structural, not a dip.
AI traffic is tiny — and worth 4.4× more
AI assistants still send well under 1% of web traffic (Ahrefs). But Semrush found the average AI-referred visitor is worth 4.4× an organic one — they arrive pre-qualified, after the assistant already compared the options. Small stream, concentrated gold.
AI crawlers do not run JavaScript
Vercel’s crawler study found GPTBot and ClaudeBot fetch JavaScript files but never execute them. Content rendered client-side is invisible to ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. Server-side rendering is the entry ticket — and most sites fail at the door.
What actually gets cited
Princeton’s GEO research (10,000 queries) measured up to 30–40% visibility gains in generative engines from adding statistics, quotable lines and cited sources — while keyword stuffing did nothing. Roughly half of AI Overview citations rank below the top 10: structure now beats position.
There is no secret schema
Google’s own documentation: no special markup is required for AI Overviews, and “optimizing for generative AI is still SEO.” Anyone selling you a proprietary “AEO package” of magic tags is selling snake oil — the work is rendering, structure, facts and authority.
llms.txt: we ship it, we do not sell it
Ahrefs found 97% of llms.txt files receive zero bot requests. We publish one on this very site — it costs nothing — but we will never bill you for it as a strategy. That is the difference between doing something cheap-but-harmless and charging for theater.
Sources: Pew Research, July 2025 · Ahrefs CTR research · Semrush AI visitor value · Google’s AI search guidance
Visibility work we can show
From legacy code to a fully managed marketing website for a global communications platform
View case study →Building a high-performance marketing website from the ground up for an AI-powered service
View case study →Zero-loss lead generation for a multi-regional travel brand
View case study →Orchestrating a global digital merger: from Novigo to ArchLynk
View case study →Honest answers
Can you guarantee a #1 position?
No — and nobody honest can. What we guarantee is the engineering side done right: crawlability, structure, speed and measurement, reviewed continuously.
Do you write content too?
Our core is technical and structural — making your existing and future content findable and quotable. We work alongside your copywriters and tell them exactly what structure search and answer engines reward.
What does AEO mean in practice?
Making your site the source AI assistants quote: structured data, unambiguous facts, question-shaped sections and clean semantics. The Sendbird and Delight.ai projects both include ongoing AEO work.
Is SEO still worth it now that AI answers everything?
Two facts are true at once: clicks from classic results are genuinely down (Pew measured 8% vs 15% when an AI summary appears), and AI referrals are still under 1% of traffic but convert about 4.4× better. The work happens to be the same — Google states plainly that optimizing for generative AI is still SEO. You are not choosing between them.
How will we know if AI assistants send us actual customers?
GA4 channel groups over AI referrers, plus Search Console’s Generative AI report for AI Overview impressions. Honest caveat we state up front: a large share of AI-referred sessions arrive with no referrer and hide in Direct traffic — anyone promising you a precise “AI ROI” number is making it up.
Should we block AI crawlers?
Know the difference first: blocking training bots (GPTBot, Google-Extended) protects content; blocking retrieval bots removes you from AI answers entirely. And check your CDN — Cloudflare now blocks AI crawlers by default on many plans, so some sites are invisible to assistants without ever deciding to be.
Losing traffic to AI answers?
Send us your domain — we will tell you honestly where you stand in classic search and AI visibility, and what to fix first.
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