Verticality is an AI SEO agency for B2B SaaS, DTC and regulated brands — best for teams that already invest in SEO and need it to work in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity too. We keep what earns your rankings, change what AI search reads differently, and report Google and every AI engine side by side.
The definition, and the honest part
AI SEO is search engine optimization extended to the answers AI assistants write: the work that earns your Google rankings, plus the work that gets those pages and your brand named by ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity. The same work goes by AI search optimization or AI visibility optimization; its off-site half is what the industry calls generative engine optimization (GEO).
Your buyers already ask there: Google's AI Overviews have more than 2.5 billion monthly users (Google, 19 May 2026) and ChatGPT more than 1 billion weekly users (OpenAI, 31 August 2026).
Stays SEO
Changes for AI answers
If you already know which part you need, three pages go deeper: off-site citations on our GEO agency page, being the extracted answer on our AEO agency page, and where each model gets its sources on our LLM SEO agency page.
Our tracker, other brands' markets, September–October 2026
We save Google's first page for every question we track, every day, next to the answers each AI engine gives to the same question. Across eight brands we track outside our own category — B2B software, e-commerce, financial services, local services and others — this is how often each engine cited the pages Google ranked at the top:
| Engine | Cites the page Google ranks #1 | Cites any of Google's top 3 | Of the pages it cites, share on Google's page one |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | 51.8% | 84.7% | 44.3% |
| Perplexity | 53.9% | 76.4% | 16.3% |
| ChatGPT | 10.1% | 19.0% | 8.1% |
Method: verified Google page-one snapshots only, in each brand's own market; answers with at least one citation; URLs matched after removing protocol, www, parameters and trailing slashes. Google's results are for the question as typed. First two columns 4 September – 4 October 2026, third column 4 September – 3 October 2026. Our own category, marketing services, is excluded; on our own 130 questions the first column reads 43.0%, 42.4% and 11.7%. The same comparison from the other side is in GEO vs SEO.
Why your SEO report misses part of the picture
ChatGPT turns a buyer’s question into searches of its own. Across the ten brands we track, it ran 3,712 searches for 1,966 answers to non-branded questions from 29 September to 2 October 2026; 26.4% added a year and 13.1% asked for the “best” or “top”.
What it meansKeyword research becomes question research: we map the searches the engines run for your buyers’ questions and make sure one of your pages answers each.
On two client sites, an online store and a B2B software company, queries whose position held lost clicks once an AI Overview answered them. Topics answered by a guide fell 41% (511 to 302 clicks across 64 queries) while product and category queries held (272 to 266 across 77).
What it meansInformational traffic stops being the KPI; the pages that decide the purchase take its place.
For non-branded buying questions across the ten brands we track, blog posts and guides were 28.0% of what AI answers cited, “best X” lists and roundups 25.9%, and the brands’ own home, product, service and pricing pages 16.8%.
What it meansPart of AI SEO happens on other people’s pages.
The third change is why our programme reaches beyond your site; the GEO agency page covers that part in detail, and our guide on what to change when AI Overviews take your clicks covers the second.
Client test: US, non-branded queries with at least 200 impressions in each window and a position change of one place or less; 15 September – 30 November 2025 against 15 July – 29 September 2026, so seasonality is not removed. Cited page types: 4 September – 2 October 2026, non-branded questions, all three engines.
What we change, and what you get
We start from the SEO programme you already run. Each workstream keeps its classic job and gains the part that AI search optimization adds.
| Workstream | What classic SEO keeps | What AI SEO adds | You get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical | Crawl, render, index, speed. | Access for the crawlers AI search uses, Bingbot included; the facts that matter in the HTML the server sends, so a crawler that skips JavaScript still reads them; IndexNow so Bing hears about every change. | An access and index report per engine, and the fixes. |
| Research | Keywords by volume and difficulty. | A prompt set of 50–200 questions your buyers ask AI assistants, and the searches the engines run for them. | The prompt set and a question-to-page map. |
| Content | Pages built around keywords. | Decision pages — pricing, comparisons, “best for”, alternatives — that state who it is for, what it includes and what it costs as sentences an engine can lift. | Rewritten pages, each tied to the questions it should win. |
| Authority | Backlinks. | Citations in the roundups, review profiles, Reddit threads and videos the engines cite for your questions, ranked by how many of your questions each one affects. | A placement plan, then the placements. |
| Measurement | Rankings, traffic, conversions. | Mentions, citations and share of voice per engine, tracked daily, next to rankings, organic leads and visits from AI assistants. | A monthly report and a dashboard with the raw answers. |
A real answer, 19 October 2026
The question, as a buyer would type it
“Which agency can get ChatGPT to recommend my business to customers?”
The buyer never typed “generative engine optimization”; the engine did, and every agency page it linked carried the words of that search in its address. The fact it repeated about us was a plain sentence on our page. That is why AI SEO starts with the questions and the words on the page, not with markup.
One answer is still an anecdote: from 4 to 23 September 2026 ChatGPT cited only 26.4% of the same URLs again the next day for the same question, which is why we re-run every question daily.
A dated case with a baseline
We do not publish client numbers without the client's approval, so the case we can show in full is our own.
What is left is the gap this page is built to close: AI Overviews lean on Google's top results, and most of our new pages do not rank there yet.
Two rows of our own report, 21 September – 20 October 2026. A client report has one row per question and engine, and every number opens the answers behind it.
| Engine | Answers | Name us | Link to us | Top competitor named in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 28 | 23 | 23 | 22 |
| Google AI Overviews | 29 | 0 | 0 | 19 |
| Perplexity | 29 | 0 | 0 | 28 |
| Engine | Answers | Name us | Link to us | Top competitor named in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 28 | 0 | 0 | 15 |
| Google AI Overviews | 29 | 0 | 0 | 13 |
| Perplexity | 29 | 0 | 0 | 17 |
The same question can be won on one engine and lost on the other two, which is why we report per engine and never as one blended score.
"Our content started appearing in AI Overviews within weeks. We’re cited where our competitors simply don’t exist."
Client
Head of Marketing, Tech SaaS
"Verticality understood AI SEO before most agencies even knew what it was. The visibility gains have been significant."
Client
CEO, Software Company
"We’re now showing up in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews for our key services. The leads are high quality and highly intent."
Client
Marketing Director, Professional Services Firm
If you already have an SEO agency
You do not need to replace your SEO agency. We split the work so nothing is done twice:
The audit shows how much of the gap your current programme already covers.
Published, with its term
Our AI SEO programme costs $2,500 to $7,500 a month, month-to-month with no minimum term. It is the same programme as our GEO work, priced by scope, and the free AI visibility audit sets the number. The programme levels are on our GEO agency page.
Agencies that publish an AI SEO price start at about $1,500–3,000 a month; mid-market programmes run $3,000–10,000, and enterprise work starts above $10,000 (agency pages and roundups checked on 21 October 2026). None of the three agencies at the top of Google for “AI SEO agency” publishes a price.
Get a free AI visibility auditIt fits when
Wait if
Checked against about 4,000 AI answers
From 21 September to 20 October 2026 we read every answer ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity gave to the 49 questions we track about hiring help with AI search. This is what they tell buyers to check, and our answer to each.
| What the answers tell buyers | How often | Our answer |
|---|---|---|
| Be wary of guarantees: no one controls which sources an engine cites | About 4 in 10 ChatGPT answers, 1 in 4 of Perplexity’s | We don’t guarantee citations. We commit to a baseline, a change log and daily re-runs of the same questions. |
| Ask for a case study with a baseline, a timeframe and the measured lift | 43% of ChatGPT answers | Ours is above, dated, on our own brand. Client cases appear when clients approve them. |
| Ask to see the actual prompts, cited URLs and raw answers behind any claim | About 1 in 4 ChatGPT answers, 1 in 5 of Perplexity’s | That is what the free audit is, for your category, and you keep it. |
| Look for off-site authority, not schema or llms.txt fixes alone | Off-site authority comes up in 8 of 10 ChatGPT answers; 1 in 10 warns against one-trick fixes | Citations off your site are one of our five workstreams. |
| Tie the work to pipeline, not to visibility alone | More than half of ChatGPT answers | We report organic and AI-referred leads next to mentions. |
| Avoid fake reviews, undisclosed posting and mass-produced AI content | About 7% and 6% of ChatGPT answers | We write for the reader and post only from accounts that say who they work for. |
Your questions
An AI SEO agency makes your site and brand show up in AI answers as well as in Google results. It fixes access for AI crawlers and Bing, rewrites decision pages to state facts plainly, earns citations on the sites the engines quote, and tracks every engine’s answers to your buyers’ questions. At Verticality that is one programme with your Google SEO, reported side by side.
Our AI SEO programme costs $2,500 to $7,500 a month, month-to-month, and the audit that scopes it is free. Agencies that publish an AI SEO price start at about $1,500–3,000 a month, and mid-market programmes run $3,000–10,000.
Partly. Crawlable pages, useful content and trusted links still decide Google rankings, and Google’s AI Overviews lean on them: in our tracking they cited the page Google ranked first in about half their answers. What is new is the rest: questions instead of keywords, citations as well as rankings, sources on other people’s sites and reporting per engine. ChatGPT cited Google’s first result in only one answer in ten.
AI SEO is the umbrella: search optimization aimed at Google and at AI answers together. GEO is its off-site part, earning citations in the sources AI answers quote; AEO is being the answer an engine extracts, and keeping it correct; LLM SEO works model by model, through the index each assistant reads. Which one you need depends on where you are missing: in the rankings, in the answer, or in the sources.
No. The term has two meanings: SEO done with AI tools, such as drafting content or automating audits, and SEO aimed at AI answers. This page is about the second. We automate our tracking and reporting, and we do not mass-produce content.
Yes. Your SEO agency keeps technical maintenance, content and link building; we take the question research, the AI-facing rewrites of your decision pages, off-site citations and tracking per engine, with one shared change log.
First signals come in 2–6 weeks, usually from on-site changes such as a rewritten page picked up by an AI Overview. Results compound by month 3–6, as citations on other sites land.
No. No one can guarantee a citation in ChatGPT or an AI Overview, because the engines choose sources answer by answer; OpenAI says placement is not guaranteed. What we commit to is a baseline before we start, a log of every change and daily re-runs of the same questions, so you can see what moved and why.
We track ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity every day, for every question in your set, and report your Google rankings next to them.
Per engine and per question: the share of answers that name you, the share that link to your site, and your share of voice against the competitors named alongside you. Next to that we report Google rankings, organic leads and visits that come from AI assistants.
Partly. ChatGPT and Perplexity cite many pages outside Google’s first page, including roundups and threads about you, so off-site work can move them first. Google’s AI Overviews follow rankings: in our tracking a page in Google’s top 3 was cited in about five AI Overviews in six. The audit tells you where to start.
No. Tracking tools show where you are named, for roughly $100–500 a month for the software, but they do not rewrite your pages, earn citations or fix access. We run our own tracker and include it in the programme.
Keep exploring
Make your next step specific
Start with a free AI visibility audit. It begins with a 30-minute call; by day 10 you get the baseline — your buyers' questions run through ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, next to your Google rankings — and by day 15 a ranked work plan. It is yours whether or not you hire us.
Vadim Litvak
Founder, Verticality
Messages are stored as described in our Privacy Policy.
Trouble loading? Open in a new tab