The way people discover businesses online is expanding. Alongside Google and other traditional search engines, potential customers are using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity to research services, compare products, understand problems, and explore possible solutions. For agencies, this creates a new responsibility: helping clients understand whether their brands are appearing in these AI-powered discovery experiences. The Fly Social AI Search Visibility tool gives agencies a practical way to examine brand mentions, website citations, competitors, and visibility across supported AI platforms.

Helping a client become more discoverable in AI search, however, is not as simple as adding a few keywords or creating pages specifically for ChatGPT.

There is no guaranteed formula that makes an AI platform mention a particular company. Agencies need a broader approach that combines strong SEO foundations, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), useful content, accurate brand information, credible online presence, and ongoing AI visibility measurement.

Start by Understanding the Client's Current AI Visibility

Before changing a client's website or content strategy, agencies should establish what is currently happening.

Start with questions potential customers might realistically ask while researching the client's market.

For example, an agency working with an accounting software company might test questions about software for small businesses, invoicing solutions, bookkeeping platforms, or comparisons between relevant types of tools.

Then examine the responses.

Does the client's brand appear?

Which competitors are mentioned?

Is the client's website cited?

Which topics cause the client to appear or disappear?

Are results different across AI platforms?

This creates a baseline that agencies can use to identify areas that deserve further investigation.

AI visibility measurement should be treated as a diagnostic process rather than an official ranking system.

Understand How Customers Actually Search

Agencies should not build an AI search strategy entirely around traditional short-tail keywords.

People often communicate differently with conversational AI.

A traditional search might be:

“social media management software”

An AI search could be:

“What social media management software is suitable for a small agency managing several client accounts?”

The second query contains more context about the user's situation and intention.

Agencies should therefore research the real questions surrounding a client's products and services.

Sales conversations, customer-support enquiries, FAQs, website searches, reviews, keyword research, and common objections can all provide useful insights.

These questions can then guide both content creation and AI visibility monitoring.

Make the Client's Business Easy to Understand

One of the most practical improvements an agency can make is helping a client explain its business clearly.

A website may look professional while still being difficult to understand.

Statements such as “transforming tomorrow through innovation” may sound impressive, but they do not clearly explain what a company sells, who it serves, or what problem it solves.

Important pages should clearly communicate the company's products, services, target audience, expertise, and relevant markets or locations.

Product and service pages should also provide enough information for customers to understand what is actually being offered.

Clear brand information benefits human visitors while creating a stronger informational foundation across traditional and AI-powered search experiences.

Strengthen Traditional SEO Foundations

Agencies should not abandon SEO in an attempt to optimize exclusively for AI.

Strong technical and content foundations remain important.

Client websites should be accessible, logically organized, mobile-friendly, and easy to navigate. Important pages should have clear titles and headings, useful internal links, accurate information, and content that matches genuine search intent.

Agencies should also identify indexing problems, unnecessary duplicate pages, outdated information, and other issues that may make useful website content harder to discover.

AI search optimization works best as an extension of a strong digital foundation rather than a replacement for traditional SEO.

Combine SEO With AEO and GEO

Agencies can broaden their search strategies by considering SEO, AEO, and GEO together.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) focuses on making content relevant, accessible, and discoverable through traditional search engines.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) focuses on providing clear answers to questions users are asking.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) considers how information and brands may be understood and represented within generative AI experiences.

These areas overlap significantly.

For example, a detailed service page with clear headings, useful explanations, direct answers, and original information can support traditional search while also making the content easier to understand in conversational search contexts.

Agencies should focus on creating useful information rather than attempting to build separate pages for every AI platform.

Create Content Around Genuine Customer Needs

AI search gives agencies another reason to move away from generic content production.

Instead of publishing articles simply to meet a monthly content quota, agencies should identify what customers genuinely need to understand.

If prospects repeatedly ask how pricing works, explain the factors affecting pricing.

If customers struggle to understand two similar services, create a meaningful comparison.

If implementation regularly creates confusion, publish a practical guide.

If the client has unique expertise, processes, research, or data that can responsibly be shared, use it to create original resources.

Content based on genuine knowledge provides more value than rewriting information already available on hundreds of websites.

Agencies should also avoid inventing statistics, customer results, research, or case studies simply to make content appear authoritative.

Review the Client's Complete Digital Presence

AI discoverability should not be treated as a website-only project.

Potential customers may encounter a client through its website, search results, business profiles, social platforms, review websites, industry publications, or other relevant sources.

Agencies can use the Fly Social marketing tools collection to explore different areas of digital marketing and online visibility when auditing a client's wider presence.

The purpose is to understand where information may be incomplete, outdated, inconsistent, or unclear.

A strong digital presence should accurately represent the business across the channels that genuinely matter to its customers.

Help Clients Build Credible Third-Party Presence

A client's own website is important, but it is not the only place where information about the company exists.

Agencies can help clients develop legitimate visibility through relevant industry publications, professional directories, partnerships, associations, interviews, reviews, and other credible third-party sources.

This should be approached as genuine brand building rather than an attempt to manufacture AI signals.

Avoid low-quality directory submissions, fake reviews, irrelevant backlinks, or mass-produced mentions.

The objective is to build a credible digital footprint based on real business activity, expertise, relationships, and customer experiences.

Make Content Easy to Navigate and Understand

Agencies should also examine how client information is structured.

Long pages containing several unrelated ideas can make important answers difficult to locate.

Use descriptive headings, focused sections, clear definitions, logical internal links, and direct answers where appropriate.

Lists and tables can also be useful when they genuinely make information easier to understand.

Structured data may be appropriate for supported content types, but agencies should not present schema markup as a guaranteed method for gaining AI mentions or citations.

There is no special markup that guarantees discovery by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, or another AI platform.

Good structure improves clarity; it is not an AI ranking shortcut.

Analyze Competitors Appearing in AI Search

Competitor analysis can help agencies understand where clients may have information gaps.

If competitors repeatedly appear for relevant prompts, investigate their wider digital presence.

Do they explain their products more clearly?

Do they answer important questions the client has overlooked?

Are they publishing original research or detailed documentation?

Are credible third-party sources discussing them?

Do they have stronger resources around an important topic?

The objective should not be to copy competing websites.

Instead, agencies can use these observations to determine where the client could provide clearer, deeper, more useful, or more original information.

Track Mentions and Citations Separately

Agencies should also help clients understand the difference between an AI mention and a website citation.

A brand mention occurs when an AI-generated response names the client or its product.

A citation occurs when the client's website or a particular page is referenced as a source.

A brand can be mentioned without receiving a citation, and a website can potentially be cited without receiving prominent attention in the answer.

Tracking these separately provides a clearer picture of AI search visibility.

It also prevents agencies from reducing AI visibility to one misleading score.

Embed AI Search Visibility on the Agency Website

Agencies can make AI visibility analysis more accessible by allowing prospects to explore it directly.

Fly Social allows agencies to embed the AI Search Visibility tool on their own website, giving visitors an easy way to check how their business appears across supported AI platforms.

This can provide a useful starting point for client conversations.

A prospect might discover that competitors appear for important buying-intent questions while its own brand is absent. Another may find that its company is mentioned, but its website receives few citations in the tested responses.

The agency can then investigate the findings and determine whether content, SEO, AEO, GEO, brand information, or the wider digital presence deserves attention.

The embedded report should be presented as a diagnostic snapshot rather than a guaranteed or permanent AI ranking.

Monitor AI Visibility Over Time

AI search results can change.

Different platforms, models, prompts, available information, and context can produce different responses.

Agencies should therefore avoid making decisions based on one prompt or one AI-generated answer.

Instead, establish a meaningful set of prompts connected to customer intent and monitor them periodically.

Look for patterns.

Is the client beginning to appear across more relevant topics? Are competitors changing? Are useful client pages receiving citations? Is visibility different between platforms?

Tracking patterns over time gives clients a more meaningful view than treating every AI response as a fixed search position.

Final Thoughts

Helping clients get discovered in AI search is not about finding a secret ChatGPT ranking factor.

It requires agencies to strengthen the same qualities that make a digital presence genuinely useful: clear business information, accessible websites, original expertise, relevant content, accurate information, credible third-party presence, and answers that address real customer needs.

SEO remains important, while AEO and GEO provide additional ways to think about how information works within conversational and generative search.

Agencies should measure brand mentions, website citations, competitor visibility, and relevant prompts to understand where opportunities and gaps may exist.

They can also embed an AI Search Visibility tool on their own websites, allowing potential clients to explore their visibility and creating a practical starting point for deeper analysis.

No agency can guarantee that an AI platform will mention, cite, or recommend a particular client. The more sustainable objective is to help businesses create a clear, trustworthy, useful, and well-supported digital presence that can serve customers across traditional search and emerging AI-powered discovery.