Definition
AI search optimization is the umbrella practice of making a brand discoverable, citable and favorably represented across AI-powered search experiences — including ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot. The term is broader than GEO or AEO alone: it covers crawler access, structured data, evidence-dense content, entity consistency, freshness signals and answer tracking as a unified discipline. In practice, AI search optimization work follows a loop: audit whether engines can crawl and parse your pages, fix structural gaps (robots.txt rules, JSON-LD, llms.txt), rewrite key content around quotable evidence, and monitor mentions and citations across engines to verify lift. The term gained traction in 2025 as marketers searched for a plain-English label that avoids the alphabet soup of GEO, AEO and LLM SEO. Teams that already run GEO programs are doing AI search optimization — the difference is naming, not method.