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Lily Grozeva has spent over 20 years in SEO, growth, and digital strategy. In the past several years she has focused on how AI systems change discovery, search behaviour, and product evaluation. She has worked with fintech and complex B2B companies including Telerik, Clune Tech, and other enterprise technology teams. She joined Eleven Ventures for a workshop to share her practical framework for staying visible in the era of AI search.
Search used to give you ten blue links. Today it hands you one synthesized answer, and if your brand isn’t in it, you effectively don’t exist for that user. ChatGPT alone now accounts for roughly 20% of global search-related traffic, and together with Perplexity and Copilot, these tools answer millions of product, comparison, and recommendation queries that used to send people directly to a company’s website.
For founders, this raises one uncomfortable question: When someone asks an AI “what’s the best tool for X” or “top alternatives to [your competitor]” – does your company get mentioned?
In many B2B categories, AI answers are quickly becoming the first evaluation layer in the buying process. Instead of visiting ten vendor websites, buyers increasingly ask an AI system to summarize the landscape. The companies mentioned in that answer enter the shortlist. The ones missing from it are rarely considered.
What Is AEO, and How Is It Different from SEO?
"To navigate the current search landscape, businesses should view AEO as an upgrade to traditional SEO rather than a replacement."
Lily Grozeva
Founder Saltanat Labs
The goal is the same – get in front of the right people, but the mechanics are different in a few important ways:
- You no longer control the narrative. AI synthesizes your site alongside G2 reviews, Reddit discussions, and analyst reports to produce one blended answer. You’re one input among many.
- You’ll appear next to competitors. Classic SEO can give you an exclusive #1 spot. AI answers often group you: “Mailchimp, SendGrid, and [Your Brand] all offer email APIs.” Valuable, but your positioning needs to stand out even in that context.
- Proof points beat long guides. Traditional SEO rewards comprehensive content. AI rewards specific, verifiable facts – “How Stripe cut deployment time by 40%” gets cited far more than a 3,000-word best practices guide.
One more important mental shift:
In AI Search, visibility does not equal clicks and traffic.
AI may drive fewer clicks to your site overall, but the visitors who do come through arrive more informed and closer to a decision. In fact, early data says they convert at up to 4.4x higher rates than traditional search traffic.
How AI Decides What to Recommend
AI systems don’t simply rank pages the way traditional search engines do. They’re trained on massive datasets to predict the most authoritative, statistically probable answer based on patterns, not links.
AI models do not just “read” content; they extract facts, trade-offs, and consensus to synthesize an answer.
Three things drive AI recommendations:
1️⃣ Source credibility – a mention in TechCrunch or G2 carries far more weight than a mention on a standard blog. AI has learned which sources to trust.
2️⃣ Content depth – a thorough implementation guide beats a thin feature list. Depth signals authority.
3️⃣ Contextual match – AI evaluates the semantic fit between your content and the specific intent of the query. A technical docs page will beat a generic pricing page for a technical question.
The bottom line:
“In AI search, citations and mentions increasingly play a similar role to backlinks in traditional SEO,” says Lily.
The Fastest Wins: Fix These First
Before building any AI-specific strategy, get your foundations right. Most companies have basic issues silently blocking them from being cited. Fixing those is often the fastest visibility win available.
"Strong SEO foundations are at the core of AI Search success."
Lily Grozeva
Founder Saltanat Labs
- Replace vague messaging with concrete nouns.
If a human can’t understand what you do in ten seconds, AI won’t either. AI systems rely on clear, concrete language, not marketing fluff.
“AI-powered platform that transforms workflows” is invisible. “Meeting transcription software for sales teams” is not. Audit your homepage and key pages – and kill the vague language.
- Ungate your best content.
Ungating strategic content is the fastest visibility win.
Comparison guides, playbooks, ROI calculators, technical docs, pricing pages – if they’re behind a form, AI can’t see, cite, or recommend you based on them.
- Convert key info to HTML text. Pricing tables in images, product comparisons in PDFs, specs in JavaScript – AI systems struggle to extract information from these formats. If the information matters, it needs to exist as crawlable HTML text.
- Stop ignoring Bing.
Most founders ignore Bing completely, which means you’re invisible in ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity.
Bing is the backbone of all three platforms. Verifying your site and enabling IndexNow takes 15 minutes. You can import directly from Google Search Console. It’s one of the easiest high-impact actions on this list.
- Answer pre-purchase questions directly on your site. “Does it integrate with Salesforce?” “What’s the pricing for a 10-person team?” – these are the prompts people are asking AI. If the answers aren’t on your site, AI has nothing to cite.
- Add structured data (schema markup). AI models use Schema.org structured data as a signal that helps machines understand who you are, what category you belong to, and how you connect to the broader ecosystem. Organization, FAQ, and Product schema are the places to start.
The Foundation Is Set. Now What?
The good news is that most of the fixes above don’t require a big budget or a marketing team. They require awareness and a few focused hours. Start with the quick wins covered above. These alone can meaningfully shift how AI models perceive and recommend you.
But getting your foundations right is just the beginning. Once AI can find you, the next question is: how do you make sure it consistently picks you? That’s where prompt research, content optimization, and building authority beyond your own website come in.
In Part 2, we will go even more hands-on: prompt research, content optimization, and building the third-party presence that makes AI recommend you over your competitors.
And if you want the full framework now, the AI Visibility Founders Playbook covers it all in one place. Download it here.
