Devstars
Most SMEs have no idea whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews recommend them to potential customers. The agencies they’re paying for SEO usually can’t tell them either. That’s a problem, because the conversation has already moved.
If you’re running marketing for a scale-up or a funded start-up, your CEO is about to ask you a question you might not be ready for. This piece is about getting ready.
People used to research a purchase by typing keywords into Google, clicking through five or six links, and forming an opinion. Now they ask ChatGPT, “What’s the best CRM for a 50-person SaaS business?” and ChatGPT gives them three names. Or they ask Perplexity for a recommendation and get a comparison table with citations.
The research phase has moved into AI tools. Your website still matters, but it matters at a different point in the journey. By the time someone lands on your site, they’ve often already decided you’re a contender. The buying decision is now made in the AI conversation, not on your homepage.
We call this the bifurcated search model. Research happens in AI tools. Purchase happens on your website. If you’re not showing up in the research phase, you’re not getting into the purchase phase.
If you’ve been staring at Google Search Console wondering why your impressions are climbing but your clicks are flat or falling, you’re not imagining it. This is what we call the Jaw Effect. The impressions line goes up. The clicks line goes down. They part company like a jaw opening.
What’s happening is Google AI Overviews and the AI tools are absorbing the search intent. People get their answer in the AI summary and never click through to your site. 59% of Google searches now end without a click. Your traffic is being eaten by AI tools that are happy to quote you without sending anyone your way.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that being quoted by AI tools is now the new visibility. If ChatGPT recommends you, that’s worth more than ranking third in Google for a generic keyword. The question is whether AI tools are quoting you in the first place.
Quick definitions, because the acronyms are flying around and most agencies are using them loosely.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the practice of optimising your content, structure, and authority signals so that generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini cite, recommend, or quote your business when users ask relevant questions.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is the closely related practice of structuring your content to be picked up by answer engines, which includes AI tools but also Google’s featured snippets, Google AI Overviews, and voice assistants like Alexa or Siri.
In practice, the two overlap heavily. If you do GEO properly, you’re doing AEO. Some agencies are starting to use the term AI Search Optimisation as a catch-all. The label matters less than the work.
The honest answer is that there’s no Google Search Console for AI tools yet. There’s no single dashboard. What you can do is run a structured audit, and you can do a lot of it yourself in an afternoon.
Here’s the basic check:
If your name comes up across multiple queries on multiple platforms, you’ve got AI visibility. If it never appears, you don’t. Most businesses we run this exercise for sit somewhere in between. They show up for one obvious branded query and nothing else.
This is the audit we do as the first step of our GEO Readiness Assessment. We just do it more systematically, across more queries, with screenshots and a scoring framework.
If you’re a marketing manager at a funded start-up or a scale-up, here’s the conversation that’s coming. It usually arrives within 90 days of the CEO reading something about AI search, or hearing it from a board member, or asking ChatGPT a question and being surprised by the answer.
The question will be some version of: “What are we doing about AI search? Are we showing up in ChatGPT?”
The reality is most marketing teams aren’t ready for that question. The agency they’re paying for SEO will deflect, because GEO sits outside the traditional SEO playbook. The in-house team will scramble to put together a holding answer. Nobody will have data.
You want to be the marketing manager who has the answer. Not a panicked one. A structured one with a current state assessment, a gap analysis, and a 90-day plan.
That’s what GEO readiness actually means. It’s not a vague future-readiness thing. It’s having a defensible answer to a question your CEO will ask soon.
Based on what we’re seeing across our client portfolio and our own testing, AI tools recommend businesses that score well on five things:
1. Citation-worthy content. Content that gives a clear answer to a specific question in the opening sentence. AI tools extract those quotable opening sentences and use them as the source of the answer. Long preambles and SEO-padded intros get skipped.
2. Structured data. Schema markup (FAQPage, Article, Organisation, Product) gives AI tools machine-readable confirmation of what your content is and who you are. We’ve seen this directly with South Coast Powersports, where structured data mastery drove 100+ high-intent keywords into ranking positions within six months.
3. Third-party citations. AI tools weight what others say about you heavily. Reviews on Google, mentions in industry press, citations in directories, customer testimonials with detail. The web’s collective view of you matters more than your own marketing copy.
4. E-E-A-T signals. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness. Named authors with credentials. Case studies with real numbers. Client names you can verify. AI tools are explicitly trained to favour authoritative sources over thin content.
5. Multi-platform presence. Your visibility in YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, and trade publications feeds back into how AI tools assess you. A business that only exists on its own domain looks weaker than one with a footprint across credible platforms.
Score badly on any one of these and you’ve got a gap. Score badly on three or more and you’re basically invisible to AI tools.
The Karpathy news this month is a tell. Andrej Karpathy, one of OpenAI’s original co-founders and arguably the most influential AI educator on the planet, just joined Anthropic specifically to use Claude to accelerate Claude’s own development. This is what the researchers call recursive self-improvement. AI making AI better.
What it means for you in practical terms is that the AI tools your customers use to research purchases are about to get significantly better, significantly faster. The opportunity to establish your business as a cited authority in those tools is open now. In 12 months, the gap between the businesses that moved early and the ones that didn’t will be very hard to close.
We’ve been telling clients they’ve got 12–18 months of first-mover advantage. After this month, I’d say 6–12.
If you want to know where you stand, here’s the structure we use. You can run it yourself if you’ve got the time, or we can run it for you.
The output is a document your CEO can read in 15 minutes that gives them the answer to the question they’re about to ask. And gives your team a clear plan.
This isn’t for every business. If you’re selling commodity products on price alone, traditional SEO and paid search are still your main game. If you’re an emergency service (“plumber near me at 11pm”), local SEO matters more than AI visibility.
But if you’re a scale-up selling to other businesses, a funded start-up with a complex value proposition, or a service business where customers research carefully before buying, GEO is now the single highest-leverage marketing investment you can make. Because that research has moved, and your visibility there is either being built deliberately or it isn’t.
Most medium-sized businesses are flying blind on AI search. The agencies they’re paying haven’t caught up. The window for first-mover advantage is real but closing. And the conversation with the CEO is coming, probably sooner than you think.
You don’t need to panic. You need a current state assessment, a structured plan, and someone who’s been doing this long enough to know what actually moves the needle. We’ve been doing digital marketing for 23 years and GEO specifically for the last two. We work with funded start-ups, scale-ups, and established businesses across the UK and internationally. Recent work includes Dash Rides (UK’s first salary-sacrifice e-bike platform), Investors in Property (award-winning Alpine property portal), and London Sinfonietta.
If you want to know whether ChatGPT recommends your business, we can tell you. If it doesn’t, we can fix that.
Or book a call here.
Stuart Watkins is the Founder and Sales & Marketing Director of Devstars. Devstars has been delivering bespoke web development and digital growth consultancy since 2003, working with clients including Heathrow, Ministry of Defence, Cushman & Wakefield, Investors in Property, and London Sinfonietta.
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If we’re the right fit we’ll talk about what’s next. If we’re not, I’ll point you to someone who is.
