How AI search decides who gets named and what a search diagnostic actually looks at. Written for the people who have to act on it.
Two subjects, each with its own page setting out what the territory is and what has been measured inside it. Read the hub if you want the shape of the thing. Read the feed below if you already know what you are after.
What it means to be named in an AI answer, what the four competing labels actually describe and what we have measured about who gets cited.
Published UK prices, the agencies selling it, the tools that track it yourself and whether the older half of search is worth keeping. Every figure verified.
Five tools qualified. Two publish no price. Their own AI citations total 81 between them, against 31,547 for Semrush. Every figure read from the vendor.
Both UK lists ranking GEO agencies on this query put their own publisher first. We measured something checkable instead: who AI actually cites.
Across twelve UK SERPs, 54% of the sources Google's AI Overview cited did not rank in the organic top ten beneath it. The overlap, counted.
A method you can run in an afternoon. Which prompts to use, what to record, then how to read the citations that decide who gets named.
There is no ranking. Ten UK agencies all allow OpenAI's crawlers and their ChatGPT citation counts run from 0 to 92. What decides it instead.
UK search demand for buying SEO sits at a four-year high, around twelve times the AI-search vocabulary. Plus the caveat that weakens the comparison.
The plain definition, plus a measurement. All eight pages ranking for the term in the UK hold zero AI citations. Their domains hold 8,753 between them.
Ten UK agencies, 24 months. Seven have more organic traffic than in 2024. Seven sit below their peak. Both true. The start date decides which you hear.
Ten checks in the order they bite, starting with conversion tracking. Plus what the UK results for this term actually contain, which is not what you expect.
Every published UK price we could verify, from £0 to £8,500 for the same two words. What has to be inside one before the number means anything.
The definition, the five ways it gets measured, what each one misses and why two tools can look at the same brand and return different answers.
The definition, plus a measured answer to whether AEO and GEO are different things. The two UK search results share one domain out of eight.
The definition, where the term came from, what Google says about it and what actually decides whether a model quotes your page.