GEO Consulting: improve your company's visibility in AI systems

People are starting to search less for pages to consult and more for immediate answers to increasingly detailed questions. This is why they turn to AI assistants or search engines, which cross-reference various signals to build answers and suggest the most relevant brands.

It is therefore not enough to ask “in what position does my company appear?”, but also “when a user searches for information about my industry, is my brand mentioned? How does the AI talk about it?”

Thanks to GEO, it is possible to meet these new needs: increasing brand visibility and managing how it is perceived by AI.

Search changes and the way brands are chosen

The growing role of AI in consumers' decision-making process is transforming the way companies are found, compared, and evaluated. This change leads to new dynamics of visibility.

  • Users search for information on Google and the AI overview already provides an answer, in many cases already exhaustive. According to a study by Ahref, as early as December 2025, clicks on the first search result had decreased by 58% compared to two years prior. All else being equal, there is a downward trend in organic traffic.

    In parallel, there is widespread adoption of AI chatbots: an analysis of Audicom data conducted by Vincos shows that in the month of December 2025, nearly 15 million Italians used at least one of these tools.

    Search is therefore becoming increasingly mediated by AI, which is asked to find options, summarize them, compare them, and suggest the most relevant solutions. With the spread of AI agents, this intermediation will be even more pronounced: agents evaluate alternatives and support or even execute decisions on behalf of the user. According to research by Adyen, 43% of Italian consumers would be willing to let an AI assistant carry out the entire purchasing process, including the actual transaction.

    The direction to take to gain organic visibility is clear: you need to appear in AI responses.

    But it is not enough to be cited as a source; you must be recognized as a relevant entity for the user's query.

    According to a study by Semrush analyzing 3,981 domain appearances across 115 prompts on four AI platforms, results in Italy showed that only 18% of the analyzed answers explicitly mentioned the brand. AI can therefore use your site as a source without naming your brand.

    Here arises the new visibility challenge: it is not enough for your site to provide the answer, your brand must become the answer. Therefore, it must be perceived by the AI as an entity capable of satisfying the user's request.

  • For years brands have worked to conquer a space in people's minds. Today they must conquer it in generative engines as well, making themselves recognized, understood, and represented correctly: this is entity perception, the brand perception as an entity by AI.

    For AI, the brand is an entity: an operational representation built by linking the company to categories, products, attributes, places, and sources. This information is organized into systems like knowledge graphs, already used by search engines to understand entities and relationships, and today also integrated into generative search experiences.

    Content, citations, reviews, and authoritative sources therefore contribute to defining who the brand is, what it does, and what it is associated with, strengthening or weakening its entity perception.

    The combination of this information constitutes the brand's semantic capital. It is this wealth of information and associations that influences entity perception and, consequently, brand visibility in AI-generated answers.

     

    Entity Perception

    		 Sources

    Semantic attributes
    Characteristics associated with the entity

    Owned channels, profiles

    Sentiment of sources
    The tone with which the brand is described

    Review sites, social media, communities

    Co-occurrences and mentions
    Frequency and contexts in which it appears

    Online media, industry blogs, FAQs, product sheets

    Documented experience
    Published cases, guides, and proof

    Wikipedia, publications, third-party research and reports, encyclopedic entries, attributed data

    Semantic relationships
    Links to topics, industries, and other entities

    Wikidata and knowledge graphs, directories, partners

How to govern a company's semantic capital

AI visibility depends on the set of signals that contribute to building a company's representation. Our approach starts with analyzing these signals, evaluating their strength, and identifying the levers to act on.

  • The representation of a company does not depend on a single source, but on the collection of information, associations, and confirmations that AI systems can gather about it.

    Content
    What the company publishes and documents on its own channels: the basis of declared expertise.

    Mentions and sentiment
    How much, where, and in what tone the entity is described outside of owned channels.

    Co-occurrences
    The concepts, topics, and entities with which the brand is repeatedly associated.

    Citations
    The sources that reference the brand as a benchmark: research, data, opinions, or attributed content.

    Semantic relationships
    Links to industries, topics, and other entities: partnerships, categories, organizations, and connections in knowledge graphs.

    Authoritative sources
    Sources that help validate the identity, expertise, and credibility of the entity: encyclopedias, publications, and review sites.

    Working on semantic capital therefore means building a consistent, recognizable, and authoritative ecosystem of signals that makes the company's representation in AI systems more solid.

  • To understand your company's current visibility and how it is represented by AI systems, we start by analyzing its brand perception and comparing its presence with that of key competitors on relevant industry topics.

    We integrate the AI assessment with more traditional metrics, such as organic traffic, to observe actual user behavior and identify potential convergences or divergences between visibility in search engines and presence in AI responses.

    We complete the analysis with a site audit to uncover any technical, semantic, or content gaps. From these combined analyses, we define critical issues, opportunities, and a roadmap of prioritized actions.

  • We work on the various signals that contribute to defining the company's authority, relevance, and recognizability, both inside and outside its owned ecosystem.

    Technical factors
    We optimize the technical aspects of the site to make it easily accessible and understandable to generative engines.

    Content
    We design and optimize relevant content to establish a presence across key industry topics.

    Digital PR and media relations
    We develop Digital PR activities to increase the brand's presence in authoritative publications and sources.

    Off-site mentions and citations
    Through link building activities, we acquire quality backlinks and mentions from relevant sites to increase domain authority.

    Social reputation
    We work on the consistency of the brand's presence across social channels and online communities, leveraging trust signals to build its digital identity.

Why choose us for your brand's AI visibility

Frequently asked questions

  • Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) refers to the strategies put in place to increase the likelihood that a brand will be found, cited, and represented correctly in responses from AI-based generative systems, such as ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini, and Perplexity.

    It relies not only on the content present on the site, but on the entire digital ecosystem that helps build the brand's authority and representation: citations, mentions, related entities, structured data, reviews, and other signals.

  • SEO focuses on improving a site's ranking in search engine results pages.

    GEO, on the other hand, works on the brand's presence and visibility within AI-generated responses.

    SEO best practices remain valid for GEO, but GEO extends the scope to the overall representation of the brand, also leveraging external sources beyond its own website.

    Furthermore, the reference KPIs also change between the two: SEO primarily measures position in search results, impressions, and clicks; GEO monitors the brand's presence in AI answers, how frequently it is mentioned and cited, its positioning relative to competitors, the accuracy of its representation, and the perceived sentiment.

  • AI systems analyze the request and can break it down into multiple related searches through a process called query fan-out, in order to gather the necessary information for the response.

    They draw from search engines, web indexes, databases, and proprietary or partner sources, depending on the platform.

    Sources are selected based on the relevance, authority, trustworthiness, freshness, and consistency of the information.

    Selection therefore depends not only on the quality of individual content, but also on the overall credibility of the information ecosystem associated with the brand.

  • A brand may not be cited because AI systems cannot find sufficient, consistent, or authoritative information to associate it with a specific need. Even when these elements are present, they might favor competitors with a stronger digital presence or with sources that grant them higher authority.

    To understand the reason behind this, you can rely on our GEO Intelligence service: we analyze how the brand is represented across major AI platforms, how visible it is compared to competitors, which sources and signals influence its presence, and where to intervene to improve its visibility.

  • AI visibility is measured by analyzing mentions, citations, presence in answers, positioning relative to competitors, information accuracy, and representation sentiment.

    It is useful to monitor a set of strategic queries over time and compare results across different platforms and models.

  • GEO is relevant for all brands looking to maintain their competitiveness in a search landscape increasingly driven by AI, especially in sectors where users rely on generative tools to compare products, services, companies, or solutions before making a decision.

  • Yes, we offer an initial free consultation where we understand your company's needs and create a customized sample report to show you how we work. Contact us for a free consultation.

  • It is not possible to directly modify an LLM's response. However, it is possible to intervene on the sources and signals that contribute to the brand's representation.

    By working on content, structured data, citations, sources, and information consistency, you can reduce the occurrence of inaccurate data.

  • Structured data consists of information organized into standardized schemas that help search engines and AI systems better understand entities, organizations, products, content, and relationships on a page.

    For GEO, it is an important technical component, useful for making the brand's representation clearer and more consistent, but it must be integrated into a broader ecosystem of content, authority, and consistent signals.