Search Everywhere Optimisation or How to be Found When Robots Take Over the World

Most B2B businesses are comfortable with SEO and know exactly where they stand on Google. Far fewer understand how to influence what ChatGPT or Claude are saying about their business when buyers ask – and fewer still know whether the answer would be right.

The question, how do you get found when your buyers are asking AI instead of Google, is the one we took to our latest Referrer’s Lunch. Hugh Macfarlane, align.me Founder and CEO, and Aryaan Nagrath, align.me’s Senior Digital Marketing Specialist & AI Lead, unpacked where buyer behaviour is heading, and what’s actually changed in how B2B buyers search, find, and choose who they talk to.

The race to be found first

AI search needs a preface. And Hugh opened with four numbers that reveal just how quickly the marketing landscape is changing:

• 5% of your market is in market at any one point in time (1)
• 80% of deals are initiated by the buyer, not the seller (2)
• 80% of deals go to the first vendor they talk to (2)
• 95% of deals go to one of the vendors on the day-one shortlist (3)

Positioning is everything. That’s why referrals and selective, strategic outbound still matter – they’re about building trust and being present when a buyer is ready to act.

As Hugh put it, “When the buyers initiate, we absolutely need to be the first one they talk to. Therefore, we have to be positioned with them.”

Search captures the rest – the buyers who know they have a problem, but don’t yet know who can solve it. The question is whether your business appears when they start looking – if they’ve never heard of you, or simply forgot that they have.

But getting found is becoming harder.

Recent research shows buyers are completing less of their journey before engaging a seller than they did just 12 months ago – dropping from 69% to 61% in the space of only a year (3).

It’s a sharp reversal: the trend had been moving the other way for roughly a decade, with self-directed research climbing from around 57% of the journey in 2015 to nearly 80% by 2024, before the recent swing back (4).

The takeaway: when they go looking, you have to be found. But you have to be found first. And you have to be found clearly.

Search has changed

Search is no longer just SEO. It’s the new SEO. It’s SEO 2.0.

It now breaks down into three parts:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – traditional SEO remains essential for ranking in Google and other relevant search engines
• AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) – being named and cited in AI answers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, AI Overviews)
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) – shaping the model’s existing ‘memory’ of your business in your favour

Together, they form Search Everywhere Optimisation. The emphasis is on ‘together’. Rather than treating them as competing approaches, the key is understanding that all three work together to ensure your business is discoverable wherever buyers search.

It’s a far more demanding environment than SEO alone. Being accurately represented across the internet now matters, not just ranking well in one place.

A quick test worth trying

Ask ChatGPT: “Without searching the web, what does [your firm] do?”

If AI doesn’t name you, that’s an AEO problem. If it names you but gets you wrong, that’s a GEO problem. Neither one is fixed by ranking higher – which is why SEO on its own no longer covers it.

But does the difference matter? Is our objective not to be found?

What is Search Everywhere Optimisation?

Search Everywhere Optimisation is a strategy for online visibility that goes beyond traditional search engines like Google, ensuring businesses can be discovered wherever potential customers search – including social media, voice search, and generative AI platforms (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

The state of Search Everywhere Optimisation

The theory is one thing. The numbers show just how significant this shift already is.

A 2026 Forrester study found AI is now the single most valued information source for B2B buyers – twice as valued as your own website, ahead of sales reps (5).

But good SEO doesn’t guarantee AI visibility. A study found only 38% of top 10 Google results are actually cited by AI (6).

Brett Bonser, Co-Founder and Executive Director, saw this play out directly. In a mystery shopping exercise for one align.me client – a manufacturer ranking #1 on Google – the results held up across Claude and ChatGPT as well.

But looking one rung down the ladder, the picture flipped entirely: two well-established competitors who rank highly on Google didn’t appear in AI search results at all. In their place, two niche providers Google barely ranks came up as the AI-recommended number 2 and 3 – a pattern backed by G2’s own research, which found 1 in 3 buyers bought from a company they’d never heard of before AI suggested it (7).

So, what’s getting those strangers there? Even on broad category questions, only 4.3% of what AI cites comes from your own website – other sites, directories, reviews, and articles do the rest (8). The content that matters most to AI often isn’t on your website at all.

The day-one shortlist is now being drafted by AI before you even know the buyer exists.

Search Everywhere Optimisation, measured

Search Everywhere Optimisation is not just a concept, it’s measurable.

As buyers use AI assistants to research vendors, compare options and answer complex questions, visibility depends on how consistently your business is represented across your website, third-party sources, review platforms, LinkedIn, YouTube and the wider web.

And you can measure all of this now. To illustrate it, Ary shared this example:

Image: Illustrative sample data

The five numbers that matter:

• Mentions: The answers that name you, plus your share of voice against rivals. Not every mention is a win. You can be named in the wrong category, or on a “who struggles with X” list. Good reporting splits it: named where you want to be, flagged where you don’t.
• Citations: Your page is the quoted source, a higher-trust signal than a mention. But cited isn’t endorsed. AI can quote you as the cautionary tale. Track what you’re cited for, not just that you were.
• Cited pages: Which of your URLs the engines actually quote. AI picks its own favourites, often a stale blog post over your new positioning page, quietly pinning your old story into every answer. Update what’s cited, retire what shouldn’t be.
• Cited sources: Where you’re quoted everywhere else, with YouTube and LinkedIn the strongest. These shift fast and you don’t control them, so track which third parties carry your story, which carry the wrong one, and where to invest next.
• AI visibility: The roll-up, out of 100. A score can climb for the wrong reasons, so trend matters more than the absolute number, and your real benchmark is competitors, not 100.

As Ary summed it up: “Named is good. Cited is better. Named where it matters, cited for what’s true – that’s the goal.”

Group discussions

With the challenges and opportunities of Search Everywhere Optimisation laid out, attendees split into small groups to work through two questions together: what they found most anxious, and most exciting, about this shift. Each group nominated someone to report back, and the conversation turned to the room, with guests exploring those two questions in turn.

What the room was anxious about

1. Confidence gap between SEO and AI. Most attendees felt solid on SEO fundamentals but far less certain how to drive real business advantage from AI – caught between the fear of wasting money doing the wrong thing, and the fear of missing the opportunity by doing too little.
2. Loss of control over representation. A recurring worry was how AI might misrepresent a business – brand confusion with similarly named companies, outdated offerings resurfacing thanks to AI’s long memory, or newer innovations not being picked up at all.
3. Competing in a flattened field. The groups raised concern about not being found for the right things, in a landscape where AI-generated messaging can make genuinely different businesses sound the same.

Across the room, the anxiety wasn’t really about the mechanics of control. It was about being misrepresented, not knowing what’s being said about you, by whom, and knowing it can stick around for a long time once it’s out there.

What the room was excited about

The mood shifted noticeably when the question flipped to opportunity.

1. Conversion advantage. One striking stat drove the conversation: traffic from AI converts around 4x better than organic (9). Combined with the potential to reach new markets more cost-effectively, the room saw genuine opportunity for smaller players to leapfrog larger, more established competitors in this period of disruption.
2. Faster, better-qualified buyers. Others pointed to the chance to get in front of ideal-fit clients faster, using AI to help prospects arrive at a genuine 80/20 understanding of their own situation before ever speaking to a salesperson.
3. New tools, new workflows. One attendee shared an idea in progress: a bot that continuously scans the internet for time-sensitive grant opportunities, matches them against a client base, and proactively flags relevant opportunities each week.

Hugh added a personal reflection: after 28 years of telling clients to write about the buyer’s problem rather than their own product, AI-driven search may have made that undeniably the right approach – because buyers using an answer engine like Perplexity or ChatGPT now start with a question, not a solution they already know exists as they did when using a search engine like Google.

Where to next

Ary closed with six practical, immediate steps businesses can take to hit the ground running:

1. Build a simple Search Everywhere Optimisation strategy – get the people who shape your brand voice in one room and agree what you want AI to say about you, then keep that message consistent everywhere.
2. Show up where AI actually reads – LinkedIn, YouTube, industry press, and the directories relevant to your category.
3. Get familiar with how people prompt AI about businesses like yours – prompt research is now as real and researchable as keyword research once was.
4. Lean into original evidence over fluff – case studies, data, and client numbers you’ve been sitting on. AI rewards original content, not polish.
5. Get your SEO foundations right – AI still needs to be able to read and understand your site before anything else works.
6. Start tracking your visibility monthly – get into the habit now, while it’s still early, so it’s second nature once measurement becomes standard practice.

SEO isn’t becoming less important. If anything, it’s more foundational than ever. Getting the basics right matters even more in an AEO and GEO world.

To sum up

For align.me, that means the AEO and GEO conversation isn’t a side project bolted onto SEO. It’s the same discipline, expanded to match where buyers now actually go looking.

The shortlist you’ve always fought to be on is now drafted by machines you cannot see, and the businesses that treat being accurately represented everywhere as foundational, rather than optional, are the ones that will be on it.

Ideally, you want to be known. If you’re not known, you want to be found.

If you’re not sure how to be known or found, that’s exactly the kind of gap align.me works through with clients every day. We’ll get you positioned first. If that doesn’t work, we’ll get you found. Then we can create demand. Get in touch today.

Sources

(1) https://marketingscience.info/news-and-insights/the-955-rule-why-b2b-growth-starts-long-before-the-purchase 

(2) https://6sense.com/science-of-b2b/2024-buyer-experience-report/ 

(3) https://6sense.com/science-of-b2b/buyer-experience-report-2025/ 

(4) https://acaderesearch.com/beyond-the-57-rule-how-the-modern-buyer-journey-reached-80-self-directed/ 

(5) https://www.forrester.com/blogs/b2b_buyers_make_zero_click_buying_number_one/ 

(6) https://originality.ai/blog/google-ranking-ai-citations-study 

(7) https://learn.g2.com/g2-2026-ai-search-insight-report 

(8) https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/enhanced-citation-categories 

(9) https://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-search-seo-traffic-study/