Blog
AI Search Started Sending Me Clients: A GEO Field Report
A prospect told me on our first call that an AI assistant recommended my agency. Here's what I did to become recommendable — and how I verified it wasn't a coincidence.
On a discovery call last week, my first question was: “Did you find me through an AI recommendation?”
The client was a little surprised. Then came the admission — yes, an AI assistant had recommended my agency.
That’s the first time a prospect has confirmed it to my face. And it wasn’t the first time it happened.
The unglamorous work nobody applauds
There’s no trick here. For months I’ve been doing infrastructure work that earns zero applause:
- An llms.txt file that tells AI crawlers what this site is, in plain language.
- JSON-LD structured data on every page, so machines can quote facts about the business instead of guessing.
- Blog posts that answer specific questions, written the way I’d explain them to a person — no jargon, no hype.
None of this is exciting. It’s plumbing. But plumbing is what makes you citable — and citable is what makes you recommendable.
Verification, not vibes
I don’t trust a good story without data, so I checked.
In GA4, on booking day: a session from chatgpt.com landed on my site, read deep — /audit/ to /about/ to /works/ to /contact/ — and clicked the meeting-booking button. The full chain, in the numbers.
A second case looked the same. A local spa booked an audit in October; that day, ten chatgpt.com sessions hit the site, six of them landing directly on /audit/, all engaged. I’ll be honest about the limit: without a user ID I can’t prove it 100%. But this is the strongest evidence analytics can give, and it points one way.
Buy the slot, or be the answer
Everyone’s rushing to buy ads inside AI answers right now. Paid is fine — I’m a paid media person. But there’s a difference between buying the slot under the answer and being the answer. Nobody can outbid you for the second one. It just takes the plumbing work most people skip.
What this doesn’t mean
It doesn’t mean a flood. It doesn’t mean a system. It’s early — a few cases, not a pipeline.
What it does mean: the infrastructure works. When someone asks an AI “who should audit my ad accounts,” my name comes up, and the data backs it. So I keep building: more plain-language pages, more structured facts, more answers worth citing.
If you’re wondering whether your own business is visible to AI search — or whether your ad accounts are what your agency says they are — that’s what my $1K Growth Audit is for. Fixed scope, in writing, before it starts.