AI Search: Frequently Asked Questions

The primary AI systems to optimise for in 2024-2025 are Google AI Overviews (which appear in Google search results), ChatGPT (the most widely used standalone AI assistant globally), Perplexity AI (popular among research-oriented users), and Microsoft Copilot (integrated into Bing and Microsoft 365). The good news is that the GEO principles that help one system recognise your authority generally help all of them — the underlying criteria for trustworthiness and citability are consistent across platforms. Rather than chasing each platform separately, focus on the shared fundamentals — accuracy, structure and authority — that earn citations everywhere.

Test your AI visibility by opening ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews and asking: "What is the best [your service type] in [your city]?" or "Who are the leading [your industry] experts in South Africa?" Note whether your business name appears, how it is described, and what sources are cited. Repeat this test monthly as you implement your GEO strategy to track improvement. Google Search Console also provides data on whether your pages are appearing in AI Overview results. Keep a simple log of the answers you see each month so you can measure progress over time.

Measure it in your own analytics rather than relying on spot-checking AI answers. In Google Analytics 4, traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Overviews arrives as referrals from those platforms' domains — commonly grouped and reported as "GEO sessions". Four numbers tell you most of what you need: sessions and users from AI platforms (is anyone arriving at all), engagement rate and average engagement time (is the traffic qualified), key events (is it doing anything), and purchases or leads (is it paying). The most useful starting point is a zero baseline: if the site currently receives no AI-platform sessions, every session that appears afterwards is unambiguously incremental, with no prior traffic to reattribute and no seasonality to argue about. Pair that with a monthly log of how AI assistants describe your business, since citations without clicks are real visibility that analytics alone will not show you.

In the GEO programmes we have measured, yes — and those visitors engage rather than bounce, which is what you would expect from someone who has effectively been pre-qualified by the answer that sent them. Across our anonymised case studies: a safety training provider recorded 46 purchases worth over A$9,000 from AI-platform traffic in four months; a cooking school recorded 9 tracked purchases; a vending provider saw average engagement time rise from 28 seconds to 1 minute 17; and a material-handling supplier saw a 69.11% engagement rate from AI-referred visitors. The volumes are smaller than traditional organic search today, so this is not a replacement for SEO — and because we do not have channel-by-channel comparisons for these accounts, we are not claiming AI traffic converts better than organic, only that it converts at all. What makes it worth the work is that it is growing, and that in two of those cases it started from a baseline of literally zero — meaning every sale was additional to what the existing SEO work was already producing.