Comparison
Google’s own documentation states there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode and no special schema needed. That is true, it is inconvenient for everyone selling in this category, and any page that skips past it is not worth reading. What it does not cover is the pages you do not own. Being indexed makes you eligible to be quoted; it does not put you in the roundup the model quotes instead, and no amount of work on your own domain adds you to somebody else’s comparison article.
| How the two differ | AI visibility work | SEO |
|---|---|---|
| Is it really a separate discipline | Partly, and we will not oversell it. The technical foundation is identical and Google says so. What is genuinely different is the target: the third-party page, and your position inside it, rather than your own ranking. | The SEO answer, that most of this is SEO, is defensible and backed by Google’s own AI features documentation, which states there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode and no special schema. Anyone claiming a wholly new discipline is selling you something. |
| Which surface the work targets | Pages you do not own. Ahrefs’ analysis of 26,283 source URLs across 750 top-of-funnel prompts found best-of blog lists are 43.8% of the page types ChatGPT cites, the largest single category, and no work on your own domain adds you to one of them. | Pages you own, and links pointing at them. The standard 2026 retainer is a quarterly technical audit, schema maintenance and four to eight articles a month on your domain. That work is real and it is not wasted; it addresses a different part of the surface. |
| The number you defend internally | Shortlist presence, reported as before and after answer transcripts and position inside named pages. Not sessions, because there are almost none to report: Conductor’s 2026 benchmark put AI referral traffic at 1.08% of total website visits. | Sessions, rankings and pipeline from organic. The right metric for SEO, well understood by every board. For most B2B software companies, classic organic still delivers far more traffic than AI answers do. If traffic is the constraint, SEO is the better buy. |
| Which comes first | SEO does, and it is not close. If AI crawlers cannot read your site, nothing done off-site rescues you. Vercel found that across 963 million monthly AI crawler fetches, none of the major AI crawlers execute JavaScript. | A competent technical SEO fixes exactly this: server-rendered HTML, stable URLs, robots.txt access, clean redirects, indexation. There is no substitute for it and no reason to buy it from a specialist at a premium. |
| Which tactics transfer | Some do and some do not, and the evidence is specific. In the KDD ’24 GEO study, keyword stuffing performed at or below the unoptimised baseline, while adding statistics, quotations and citations measurably improved visibility. | Classic ranking still helps, less than it did. Ahrefs found 38% of AI Overview citations came from top-10 organic results in 2026, down from around 76% in July 2025, as Google leaned harder on query fan-out. Pages ranking across fan-out variants are far more likely to be cited, and a good SEO is well placed to work on that. |
| What it costs | Engagements start at €5,000, which buys a 49 day proof phase: the baseline, the map of the sources shaping your category’s answers, the plan, and one qualifying mention on a relevant third-party site that neither of us owns. Miss that mention by day 49 and the €5,000 is returned in full. Past the proof phase the implementation is quoted before it starts, and two payments across the first year fall due only once the target attached to each has been verified. | Published B2B retainers in 2026 include Siege Media from $8,000 a month for content marketing and Omniscient Digital from $10,000 a month for full-service engagements, with Digital Elevator publishing managed SEO from $3,500 a month. Most now fold a GEO line into the same retainer at no extra charge. |
| Who owns it internally | Usually a VP Marketing or CMO with founder sponsorship, because the trigger is normally a founder forwarding a screenshot of an answer that names three competitors. It competes with brand and demand budget rather than with the SEO line. | An in-house SEO or content lead. If that person exists and has capacity, they are also the right person to run a tracker and do the on-site half without paying anyone extra for it. |
A B2B software company whose technical foundation is already sound: server-rendered pages, crawlers allowed, stable URLs, real bottom-funnel content. The problem is not that your pages cannot be read. It is that the third-party pages the models lean on name your competitors and not you. You want those URLs listed, your position on each, and somebody to go and change them, reported in transcripts rather than sessions.
Hire an SEO agency instead, or before us, in four common cases. If your site is not properly crawlable, AI crawlers see a blank page and that is a technical SEO job, not an outreach one. If organic search is still your main acquisition channel and you need traffic, AI referral was 1.08% of visits in Conductor’s 2026 benchmark and this work will not fill a funnel. If you have no comparison pages, no alternatives pages and no pricing page with real numbers, build those first: Profound’s analysis of 11.84 billion citations found roughly 57% of AI citations go to brand-owned sites. And if the budget supports one supplier rather than two, a good SEO agency with a competent GEO line is the better single purchase.
Every claim on this page was read from these pages in September 2026.
Before you choose anyone, including us, see the answer ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity give today when a buyer asks who to consider in your category. Free, written by hand, and yours whatever you do next.