What Is AI Visibility (AEO/GEO), and How Do You Check Yours?

Voxfound · August 2026

If you've searched anything like "why isn't my business showing up in ChatGPT" or "how do I get recommended by AI," you've run into two terms that describe the same underlying shift: AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). Neither is complicated once you strip the jargon out.

The plain-language version

For twenty years, showing up when someone searched for "electrician near me" meant ranking on Google. That's still true — but a growing share of that same question now gets typed straight into ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity instead of a search bar, and the answer a customer gets back isn't a list of ten blue links they get to evaluate themselves. It's one confident paragraph, generated by a model, naming (or not naming) a small number of businesses by name.

AEO and GEO are just the name for paying attention to that channel — making sure the answer a customer actually receives, when they ask an AI assistant instead of Google, is accurate and includes you.

Why this is a different problem than SEO

Traditional SEO is something you can directly influence: backlinks, page content, structured data, and Google will (eventually, imperfectly) reward it with a ranking. AI visibility is murkier for one simple reason — you can't see the answer until you ask, and the same question can produce a different answer depending on the model, the day, and how the question is phrased. There's no dashboard showing your "ranking." The only way to know what a customer sees is to actually ask the question yourself, the way they would.

Check it yourself right now, for free

This takes two minutes and needs nothing from you but an account you probably already have:

1. Open ChatGPT or Claude.
2. Ask exactly what a customer would ask — "best [your category] in [your city]," not your business name.
3. Read the full answer. Is your business named? Is anything said about you accurate?
4. Ask again in a new conversation. Answers aren't always consistent between attempts.

That's genuinely the whole method — there's no trick to it. We ran exactly this test, at scale, against real verified local businesses across multiple cities, and published what we found. Some of it was surprising — see our full AI Visibility Report for the actual numbers.

Where it gets tedious

Checking once is easy. Checking regularly — across every category you compete in, every city you serve, both major models, tracking whether anything changed since last month — is the part that stops being a two-minute task and starts being a real chore nobody actually keeps up with by hand. That's the specific gap Voxfound fills: it runs the real question, against the real models, on a schedule, and tells you the moment something changes. Not a prediction or a score — the actual answer, saved in full every time.