New agency says most websites are invisible to AI search, and the fix starts before content

A growing share of product research now happens inside AI assistants rather than on a search results page, and a newly founded agency says most businesses have no idea whether those assistants can see them at all.

AEO GEO Labs, an answer engine optimization and SEO agency, has released results from a five-month engagement with a consumer health company that it says show where the gains in AI search actually come from. Over the period, the client’s organic traffic grew from roughly 22,000 to nearly 800,000 monthly visits, and its citations across AI platforms rose from about 6,600 to 62,000 a month, according to data the agency published from Ahrefs and Google Search Console.

The agency’s central claim is that content was the third thing it fixed, not the first.

“Everyone starts with writing better answers,” Gupta said. “But an assistant never reads your answer if it cannot find your site, cannot tell who wrote the page, or cannot work out which pages matter. We fixed those three things in the first three weeks, and the citation count started moving before we published a single new article.”

The first fix, according to the agency, was the set of files AI crawlers consult before reading content: a hand-written llms.txt file describing what the site is authoritative on, structured data that makes the author and medical reviewer of each page machine-readable, and an internal link structure that points every article at the product or service it supports. The agency said it found at least one of those three missing on nearly every site it has since audited, including sites with strong content.

The second fix was structural. Every page was rebuilt to answer a single question, state the answer in the first sixty to ninety words, and use headings phrased as questions. Gupta said the direct-answer block at the top of each article became the most frequently quoted element across the whole site.

Only then did the agency scale content, at around 500 articles a month, alongside several hundred free tools published as indexable pages.

The agency was candid about one limit. Most of the client’s 62,000 monthly citations came from Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode. ChatGPT, it said, was the hardest platform to win and citations there fell over the period.

“Anyone promising guaranteed ChatGPT citations is overselling,” Gupta said. “What you can control is whether your site is structurally eligible to be cited. Most sites, even good ones, are not.”

The health engagement was a YMYL category, where search engines and assistants apply stricter trust standards. The agency says that makes it a useful test case: the same playbook has since been applied to a multi-modal AI platform, an AI character app that was acquired during the engagement, and a directory site built on a new domain that reached 100,000 visitors in three weeks.

AEO GEO Labs publishes a set of free tools for checking AI visibility, including an llms.txt generator, an AI crawler checker, and a structured data checker, and offers live audits of a company’s category before any engagement. The case study was first shared on Reddit, where it reached the top of several growth and SEO communities.

The agency is founder-led and works with consumer brands, health companies, and software businesses.